That he took the time, in a tilting bus with a rack hanging loose above us, to physically remove his child’s grip from his own arm — to unfasten his son’s hands from him, finger by finger, so that he could go.

There are things you cannot un-see your husband do.

That was mine.

And I have thought about why the peeling, specifically, was the thing that ended it — why that detail, out of everything, is the one permanently burned into me.

Because a person can be forgiven an instinct.

If Julian had simply frozen, or panicked, or acted on some blind animal reflex and only realized afterward what he had done, I think I could have understood it, even if I could not have forgiven it entirely; human beings do terrible things in the first split second of an emergency, before thought catches up.