Whatever else Julian took, he was not taking that.

I have thought about that small act of packing many times, the deliberate care with which I surrounded a child’s worn stuffed toy in sweaters so that nothing would crush it, and about how it was, in a strange way, the first sane thing I did — the first act of a person who was going to survive rather than dissolve.

Because in the middle of a catastrophe, when everything is being taken from you at once, there is a wisdom in the body that reaches, before the mind can even decide, for the one thing that must be saved.

Everything else in that house was replaceable, or contaminated, or simply no longer mine to care about.

The furniture, the dishes, the accumulated stuff of a marriage — Julian could have all of it, and I found I wanted none of it, because it was all bound up now with his betrayal.

But the dinosaur was different.