When I got out of the taxi minutes later, I realized I’d mistakenly given my old address, on East Second and Bowery, an efficiency studio with wonderful light and terrible everything else. I looked up at the windows where I’d lived in such happy squalor, and cried. How completely idiotic I was being. It makes no sense to grieve years. Be reasonable. Go home.

As I walked north toward our building, I lingered at each of my private graves on Second Avenue—the bench where I’d had the relationship-ending fight with a girlfriend several years ago, the bar where I’d read The House of Mirth for the first time, the café where I’d once met my estranged father for a painful coffee, and the Italian restaurant where Henry and I had soberly discussed the decision of marriage. I’d always been someone over whom the past had a powerful hold, easily importuned by nostalgia, but that evening each of these locations seemed to have lost their power. I walked right into the café where I’d had that coffee with my father, though for years I’d crossed the street to avoid passing it. I ordered a glass of wine as if I belonged there, had belonged there all along.