I sat down on that garage floor at about eleven at night on the twenty-eighth of February and I got up at about three in the morning.

I did not go inside.

That is the single most consequential thing I have ever done and it took me four hours to not do it.

Here is what four hours of that is actually like, because I have read accounts of moments like this and they are always compressed into a paragraph and it is not a paragraph.

The first thing is that you do not believe the date.

For about twenty minutes I sat on a concrete floor holding a card with two footprints on it and worked extremely hard on the theory that a volunteer had made a mistake.