Two makes a reality.

When two people agree, in the same room, that you are the one who is confused, it does not feel like an opinion; it feels like the weather, like a fact about the world you simply have to live inside.

I had spent a year unable to break that consensus, because there was no crack in it, no daylight, nowhere to put a lever.

And now, cornered by a doctor and a sealed bottle and a child’s clear voice, the consensus was breaking in front of me — he was there, she told me to, don’t put this on me — each of them reaching for the exit and finding the other one already standing in it.