The first winter after I left, Rowan asked me if I regretted it.
We were in Portland, in her kitchen, the week before Christmas. Her daughter was home from college and asleep in her old room, and the house smelled like cinnamon, and the rain was coming down against the windows hard enough that we could hear it over the music. I had a glass of wine, and she had a cup of tea, and we were sitting at the table with our feet up on the extra chairs.
"Regret what?" I asked.
"Any of it. Him. The house. The whole life."
I thought about the question. I had been thinking about it for months, in one form or another, in the mornings when I wrote and the evenings when I walked the dog and the quiet hours when I lay awake in a small house that no one had given me. I thought about what regret actually
