He had missed all of it.

Not because it didn’t exist, but because he chose a comfortable lie over the harder work of doubt, and the lie cost him ten years he could never buy back.

And I found, standing there, that the thing I felt about that was not triumph.

It was something closer to grief — not for myself, I had done my grieving years ago, but for him, and stranger still, for what he had thrown away without ever knowing its worth.

Because those ten thousand ordinary hours he had missed were not a punishment I had inflicted on him.