I said: “You told me to read the card first.

That’s the whole reason I’m sitting here.”

And she said: “Eleven months later.”

“Bernie—”

“No, listen.

Eleven months.

You lived inside it for eleven months and you told people, and there was a birthday, and you did all of that because a twenty-nine-year-old nurse said a sentence that was too clever.

“I should have said: your son was alive for two days and you should go upstairs. In the room, in front of him.