Part One: The Porch

I had rehearsed it for eleven days.

That is the part I always start with, because it makes the rest of it comprehensible.

I did not turn up at my ex-wife’s house on Christmas Eve on an impulse.

I had booked the flight on the twelfth of December, I had written out what I was going to say on the back of a boarding pass, and I had said it out loud in a rental car in a supermarket parking lot four times before I drove over.

It was ninety-one words.

I still have the boarding pass.

It began: Jessi, I’m not here to ask for anything.

It ended: I was wrong, and I knew I was wrong about four years ago, and I have been too much of a coward to come and say it, and that’s all I came to do.

I did not get to say any of it.

The house was on Chestnut, in Wilmington, a rented single-story with a carport and a wreath on the door and one of those inflatable snowmen on the lawn that had gone over sideways in the wind.

There was snow, which there is not usually, and it was melting on my shoulders while I stood there.

She opened the door.

Seven years.

She had cut her hair.

She was in a sweatshirt with flour on it and she was holding a dish towel and she looked at me for about two full seconds without saying anything at all, and I watched her go from not recognizing me to recognizing me to deciding something.

“Ivan.”

“Hi, Jessi.”