They were only now finding out.
I noticed something else in those three days that I have not been able to shake since.
I was happier alone in that penthouse than I had ever been at a single family gathering in my life.
That is a hard thing to admit, and I resisted the thought for a while, because it sounded like self-pity and I have never had patience for self-pity.
But it wasn’t self-pity; it was data.
Thirty-three years of holidays and birthdays and reunions, and I could not name one at which I had felt the simple, unguarded contentment I felt lying on that daybed with a book, answerable to no one.
Every gathering I had ever attended had been work, and I had called the work love because I did not know they were different things.
Now, separated from all of them by four decks and a wristband, I finally felt what it was to be off the clock — and the fact that this ease had required their absence told me something I could no longer un-know.
It was not that I had failed to enjoy my family.
It was that my family, as it was actually configured, had never been a place I was allowed to enjoy anything.