I thanked Denise through Daniel.

She replied that accuracy benefited everyone.

That sentence irritated me because it was so plainly true.

The affair made me want moral simplicity.

The records demanded intellectual discipline.

I began to understand that accountability required more patience than anger.

Chapter 20: The Apartment Above the Pharmacy

My new apartment was above a pharmacy and across from a laundromat.

The floors creaked in winter, and the kitchen window faced a brick wall.

I chose it because the rent was affordable and the lease did not require me to pretend my business was thriving.

On moving day my father insisted on carrying a lamp.

I told him his surgeon had forbidden heavy lifting.

He said a lamp did not count as heavy.

He carried it two steps and handed it to Luis.

We laughed.

Grace brought labeled boxes and a small plant she said was difficult to kill.

The plant survived longer than I expected.

During the first week I ate standing up because I had not bought a table.

A neighbor invited me to join a building meeting about the shared stairwell light.

I attended because I did not have a good excuse to refuse.

We discussed bulbs and maintenance for twenty minutes.

No one knew about my divorce.

No one knew about Preston.

I was simply the man in apartment three who had a reasonable opinion about a motion sensor.

The experience felt surprisingly peaceful.

I went downstairs afterward and bought a sandwich at the pharmacy counter.

The cashier asked whether I was settling in.

I said I was.

For the first time the answer felt true.

I had been defining home as the building where Allison and I had lived.

Now I was learning that home might be a place where I could leave the lights on without wondering who else was using my keys.

I assembled a small table from a flat package.

One leg wobbled until I tightened the screws.

I placed Grace’s plant in the center.

That evening I ate dinner sitting down and did not check my phone.

Chapter 21: The Locked Drawer

Grace showed me an old locked drawer in the workshop office before the final equipment sale.

It held paper checks from years before we moved to electronic payments, copies of employee certifications, and a collection of handwritten thank-you notes from customers.

Some notes described completed jobs.

Others mentioned workers who stayed late to make a damaged room usable again.