For once, everything important was precisely where I had put it, and that, I have decided, is its own kind of fortune — the quiet kind, the kind you only notice when you very nearly lose it.

I think that is the real reason I keep the folder.

Not as a trophy and not as a scar, but as a reminder that the ordinary, unremarkable life — the milk and the batteries and the library book and the child arguing about cereal — is not the boring thing you endure while waiting for something bigger.

It is the something bigger.

It is the whole prize.