Years do what years do.
The roof was replaced. The master bathroom returned to the simple arrangement of a woman who owns her marble. I dated, once, a man from the gallery's donor board who liked jazz and did not flinch when I told him the story of the cake; we lasted six months and parted kindly, which was more than I had expected and enough. Harrison married the teacher on a rainy afternoon in a courthouse with no vineyard and no performance. I wore blue. Sloan sent nothing, which was a gift. The debt was paid in full on a Thursday in November, two months ahead of schedule, with a final transfer and a note that read: Installment final. Thank you for not giving up on me when you gave up on the arrangement.
I framed nothing. I filed the receipt in the study behind the deadbolt I no longer needed but had decided to keep, because some locks are not about fear. They are about memory.
The seasons after the debt's midpoint had their own weather.
I learned to host Thanksgiving without performing abundance for people who had mistaken my table for a benefit. The first Thanksgiving alone — alone except for my sister and her husband and a neighbor who had recently lost her wife — I cooked a small turkey and set four places and felt, by dessert, something like the return of appetite. Not for food. For a life that did not require me to manage other adults' moods before I poured my own gravy. Harrison called from Claire's parents' house that year, nervous, new, asking if I was okay. I told him I was eating pie. I told him okay was too small a word for a woman who had finally tasted her own kitchen again.
Christmas, I put Walter's angel on the tree. It was dated. It was mine. The modern Nordic ghost of Sloan's aesthetic did not haunt the needles. I hung the ornaments Harrison had made in third grade from clay and paint and the arrogant confidence of children who believe glitter is structural. One of them broke when I took it out of the box. I glued it. I hung it higher than the break would show. Some repairs are like that — visible only if you know where to look.