I had a studio space down the hall where I took on residential design commissions. Modest at first. Then less modest.

I had rebuilt before. I knew how it went.

The only hard conversation was Ethan himself.

He was 9 by then and not fully able to understand what had happened, but children understand more than they can articulate. He knew the house was gone. He knew his father was somewhere different now and not part of the regular week. He was processing it in the way children do: episodically, in questions that arrived without warning.

One morning he asked me, while eating cereal, why Dad hadn’t wanted to keep him in the divorce.

I thought about what to say.

I thought about easy answers and incomplete ones.

Then I told him the truth in the clearest form I could make it.

“Your father wanted things that seemed valuable to him. I wanted what actually was valuable to me. That’s why you came with me.”