It is that I had been systematically trained across three years — by an evaluator’s report, by a therapist’s letters, by my own attorney’s entirely correct advice, by a judge’s two words at the end of a long day — that my instinct to check was the thing wrong with me, and that a person subjected to that for three years produces exactly the woman who sat in a car park with eleven questions on a phone and did not ask one.

I believe that argument.

I can teach it.

And what I actually think, at four in the morning, about eleven times a year, is this.

Odilon Prieto wrote the word unusual on a desk pad on a Tuesday, about a family he had met once.

Perlita Escárcega picked up a telephone in January about a blind in a window, eleven miles from a house she had no reason to think about, and said she felt stupid doing it.

Perpetua Oyelaran stopped, during a routine turn, and did not peel something off a child’s back, and called somebody.