“Are you tempted to sell?”

“Never ever ever. Sunk cost fallacy.” He laughed. “I think it was the wiring that pushed me over the edge. Tyler jokes that I’ll be making my grandchildren do their homework under the lights in my studio, like—you better appreciate the wattage, this is your inheritance!”

I laughed. “I heard you have kids,” I offered. “I didn’t know anyone in Pine City had other responsibilities. I thought this place was a bacchanal.”

“For everybody else, maybe, but I’m sober and married now, with, yeah, two kids,” he said. “They’re three and one, both girls,” he added, in that proud-parent singsong, and I made a gimme motion with my hand. Soon he was showing me a video of a round-cheeked toddler in a Spider-Man costume helping her year-old baby sister walk in the grass, his wife chasing behind them in a pencil skirt and sweater, laughing, and I was in love with them immediately.

“Bell is three, and Audre is the baby, fourteen months, and Emmeline is my wife.”

“That is a beautiful family,” I told him. “You’re so lucky.”

“I know it. Thank you.”

“What do you do during the year?”

“I’m the chair of fibers at the Academy.” He said it like it was embarrassing.

“That’s amazing,” I replied.

“Yeah,” he said, shrugging, “it’s good. It’s good to be back there. I was teaching at Yale some, but the commute didn’t work with my wife.”

“What does she do?”

“Em is a public defender,” he explained. “She’s extremely busy. And I don’t have studio time during the semester anymore. Her mom comes and stays during the summer when she can,” he said, making prayer hands and raising them to the sky, “so that I can be here during the week.”

“Wow. Lucky.”

“For now,” he agreed, nodding. “I mean, my wife is on a roll. This time in our lives is about her. I never wanted to teach—hell, I never wanted to be sober either—but I couldn’t continue to be unstable without making her unstable, you know what I mean?”

I laughed. “In theory. Definitely not in practice.”

“You’re young,” he said. “You’ve got all the time in the world.”

“It feels like I wasted it already.”

“Oh, don’t give me that,” he said sincerely. “I must have heard your name twenty times this year.”

“I’m freaking out, all the time,” I confessed. “I feel like I’m holding on by a thread.”

“What’s next? I heard about your loft. I’m sorry, by the way. That’s—unimaginable.”

“Thank you. I don’t know. Maybe—maybe I’ll buy a place up here.”

“You like it?”