And I said: “No. You didn’t.”

Which was true on the twenty-third of October 2023 and which is the single most wrong thing I have ever said to my child, and I did not find out how wrong for another two weeks.

I telephoned his father that night and told him all of it in about eleven minutes, and he listened and then said, “Is he all right?”, and then said, “Sarah, that’s a good kid and a stupid thing, and those are not the same,” which is the most useful sentence anybody said to me that month and which I have not told Julian about because it is his father’s to tell.

Part Thirty-Four: The Envelope