The evening before, I had been a contented, if occasionally foggy, old man who believed himself loved.

Now I was a widower in a house wired for his own murder, about to call the children he had spent a year pushing away and confess that they had been right and he had been a fool.

Pride is a heavy thing to set down, heavier at seventy-four than at forty, and I understood that the phone call I was about to make would require me to lay my whole vanity on the floor in front of the two people I had most wronged with it.

But I found, sitting there, that I did not hesitate.

Dulce had burned my pride out of me in a single night; there was nothing left of it worth protecting.

What remained was clear and simple and cold.