Those are the same facts and they are not the same story, and I have lived inside the second one, and I would not trade a single taped boot of it.

Chapter 8 — The Things I Didn’t Do

There is another list, and I have made my peace with it, but I should tell it honestly too.

I did not take vacations.

Not real ones — twenty-two years and I never once got on a plane, never saw an ocean I hadn’t driven to, never took the kind of trip that people frame photographs from.

There was a woman, once, in the years when the girls were small — kind, patient, willing — and it might have become something, and I let it go, because there was no room in a life like mine for a thing that needed tending, and I could not tend one more thing.