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Attended board meetings.
Sometimes months passed without personal conversations.
Then one October evening, three years after the night at the villa, David visited a scholarship workshop we had built outside Asheville.
The facility had fabrication bays, welding stations, computers, and architectural modeling equipment.
Students filled the building.
One young woman approached carrying a cardboard model.
“Ms. Rowan?”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to show you something.”
Her father was a roofer.
Her mother cleaned offices.
She had spent high school sketching buildings on the backs of grocery receipts because proper sketchbooks felt too expensive.
The foundation had given her a scholarship.
Her model was extraordinary.
After she left, David stood beside me.
“That’s why you kept the house.”
“What?”
“You turned the place where someone tried to take everything from you into the thing that helps other people build.”
I looked at him.
“No.”
“No?”
“I kept the house because it was mine.”
He smiled.
“Even better.”
That night, we ate barbecue at a roadside restaurant with paper napkins and plastic baskets.
Halfway through dinner, David said, “I think I’m ready to date again.”
My fork paused.
“That’s good.”
“I’m terrible at it.”
“I can imagine.”
He laughed.
“I had coffee with a woman last month.”
“And?”
“She spent forty minutes explaining why her ex-husband was a narcissist.”
“Maybe he was.”
“Probably. But she never asked a single question about me.”
“That seems inefficient.”
He smiled.
Then looked at me differently.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you ever going to date again?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
I thought for a moment.
“Because peace is expensive once you know what chaos costs.”