And then, because she is who she is and always has been, she said: “It’s eleven degrees.

Come inside and don’t say anything stupid.”

Part Two: Why I Was Standing There

I want to explain what I had actually come to apologize for, because it was not what the story eventually became, and because I did not know one single thing about the boy in the red socks until eleven minutes before he opened that door.

I came to apologize for a photograph.

In September of the year we divorced, I was four months into a deployment and Jessi was at home in Fayetteville, and somebody sent me a photograph of my wife.