The source case is never the whole story. It's just the beginning. The beginning is always the least of it. Courtney and I don't stay in touch.
That would be strange in ways I don't think would serve either of us. But I think about her sometimes. I think about her daughters. I think about what they are building without knowing they are building it.
I think about Tyler in his new apartment, starting hepatitis C treatment, calculating what he is left with. I think about Rebecca in Los Angeles, starting over in a smaller role with a smaller life than the one she had planned. I don't think about her with anger. I think about her the way I think about any system that failed to account for its own vulnerabilities.
With something that is closer to professional assessment than personal grief. I am not the person I was before the Austin trip. I think that person is coming back. What I am is a man who learned something important about the nature of trust, that it is not a feeling, it is a data set.
And when the data set begins to contradict itself, the responsible thing is not to ignore the anomalies. It is to investigate them, to document them, to wait until you have something definitive, and then to act with precision. I am a lead epidemiologist. I track things for a living.
Rebecca thought she had married someone who would look the other way because he was too tired or too trusting or too busy to notice. She married someone who notices everything. She just didn't know it until she came home from Austin. The Rose Garden in Balboa Park blooms every April.
Last April was the first one I walked through it alone. I brought coffee from a place on Sixth Avenue, and I stood in the middle of those rows of red and white and yellow, and I thought about what it means to build something and watch it burn. The answer I came to is this: you build again. Not the same thing.
Something different. Something that accounts for what you now know. That's what I'm doing. I don't know what comes next.
I'm 37 years old, and I live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, in a neighborhood I love, doing work that matters. I have a deck that now faces a canyon I enjoy looking at alone. I have Sunday mornings that belong entirely to me. I have a very particular set of skills that once helped me notice the beginning of the end of my marriage.
Those same skills, I am learning, are also very good at noticing beginnings. I'm Owen Callaway, and I pay attention for a living.