“I’m so sorry, Nora.” “You still don’t understand what you’re actually sorry for,” I said, and I stepped back inside, and I closed the door between us.

He was sorry, in that hallway, the way a man is sorry when the consequences arrive — sorry that the board had seen, sorry that his job was gone, sorry that his comfortable arrangement had collapsed.

He was not sorry for the thing itself.

He had come to my door not to apologize but to ask me to help him escape the reckoning, which is the opposite of an apology, and he could not tell the difference, and that inability was the whole story of him.

I stood on my side of that closed door for a moment and let myself feel the strangeness of it: that the man who had spent two years making me feel small and afraid was now, himself, small and afraid, on my doorstep, begging.