The banks unwound the applications; the accounts survived; the numbers went back to where they belonged.

But you cannot un-know that the tenderness was tactical.

For two years I had a set of warm memories — a woman bringing me soup when I had the flu, a woman laughing with my grandson on the floor, a woman holding my hand at my wife’s grave and telling me it was all right to be happy again.

Those memories were real; they happened; I felt them.

And every one of them is now poisoned at the root, because I know what they were for.