Lily touched his sleeve. “Damon.”
He looked down at her hand, then toward the exit.
“I need some air.”
He walked away.
Lily watched him go.
Then she turned toward me.
“Did you know he planned to ask for the house tonight?”
“I knew he wanted to discuss a path.”
Her cheeks colored.
“Dad, I swear I didn’t know exactly what he was going to say.”
“Did you know he thought the house should become yours?”
She looked at the centerpiece.
“Not like that.”
“How?”
“He said eventually it would make sense.”
“For whom?”
“For the kids.”
The answer was quiet.
It was also honest.
I looked across the room at photographs from my career. In one, Joanne stood beside me at a dedication ceremony, smiling beneath an umbrella while rain blew sideways across the platform.
“I want the kids to have good lives,” I said. “I also intend to have one.”
“No one said you shouldn’t.”
“Not in those words.”
Her eyes filled again.
“I don’t care about the money.”
“I think you care about what you believed it represented.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you thought my future was already part of your plan.”
She looked wounded.
I hated that.
A boundary does not prevent pain. It only prevents pain from deciding the outcome.
“I love you,” I said. “But love cannot require me to disappear gradually so everyone else feels secure.”
Lily pressed a napkin to her eyes.
Across the room, Harold had stopped pretending not to watch.
I stood and placed one hand on my daughter’s shoulder.
“I have a list your mother and I wrote in 1987,” I said. “I’m going to finish it.”
She looked up.
“What list?”
“Places we planned to visit.”
“You never told me about that.”
“I forgot about it for a while.”
“Are you leaving?”
“Sometimes.”
“For how long?”
“Long enough to come home happy.”
That was what Joanne had written.
Saying it aloud nearly broke my voice.
Lily covered my hand with hers.
For a second, she was the girl who used to wait at the front window when I returned from late inspections.
Then Damon appeared near the ballroom doors, his coat over one arm.
“We’re going,” he said.
Lily looked between us.
The children were at a sitter’s house. There was no practical reason to leave.
Only emotional pressure.
She stood.
“I’ll call you.”
“I know.”
Damon did not say goodbye.
On the drive to my apartment, I called Harold through the car speakers.
He answered before the second ring.
“I saw that,” he said.
“How was the shrimp?”
“Outstanding. Firm texture. Appropriate amount of sauce.”
“Good.”
“You doing all right?”
The May air was cool enough that I had cracked the window. Streetlights moved across the windshield. Somewhere in a dark yard, a dog barked at something beyond a fence.
I thought about the question.
“Yeah,” I said. “I actually am.”
Damon called four days later.