It is doing the long, quiet work of repairing what you broke — even if the person you hurt keeps the door locked forever.

Through the first year, he got only brief, formal updates: Posy had a warm winter coat, sturdy rain boots, a butterfly backpack for preschool.

Marlowe had enrolled in evening classes toward a degree in social work.

The temptation, always, was to make his remorse into a performance she would have to witness.

That is the thing he had to fight hardest, and the thing his therapist named for him early: that the instinct to show up on Marlowe’s doorstep weeping, to flood her with apologies, to make her see how sorry he was — that instinct was not actually about her at all.

It was about him.