She had asked me for money that day. It was sudden. I didn't know what to say. I said nothing. But the silence could only be a negative. She went away

I never saw her all these months. I dont know what happened to her. For me, the days which had stretched out before me unfathomably, like a summer vacation, suddenly picked up pace, like a regular school week. Between getting the house ready (a perfect house is never done) and learning to be newly married at the ripe old age of forty; between negotiating my rights and freedoms in an unexpected merger, and soothing the wounds of decades of solitude, and learning to hide the ugliest of scars; and most of all, tending and hiding the embers of the call to return to the wild. Between all that, and somewhere in my spare time, trying to keep up the pretense of fighting what was fast becoming a lost cause - my career