He looked so horrified that I started laughing before I could think to cry.

Meredith laughed too, then asked whether he had ever apologized.

I told her he had.

He’d bought me an ice cream and spent an hour searching the garden for the little bell that had fallen from my handlebars.

“He sounds more human in that story,” she said.

“He was.

I just rarely let myself remember those parts.”

She told me about her mother’s habit of singing off-key while repairing torn clothes and the time Thomas tried to bake a birthday cake in a factory break room, forgetting there was no oven.