She can explain it standing in front of the both of us.”

“We’re coming.

Twenty minutes.”

That is the entire conversation.

Four lines.

I have gone over it since with Brian, who remembers it identically, and neither of us said anything else at all.

He did not ask me how I was.

He did not say that he was sorry, or that this was insane, or that he had told Kevin he was out of his mind, all of which were true and all of which he said to me four days later in my mother’s kitchen with his hands round a mug.