He told the dispatcher I had slipped.

He performed the whole call — the worry, the urgency — for an audience of one operator, while the woman he had burned lay listening to him lie.

Of everything that happened in that kitchen, it is the delay I find hardest to forgive, harder even than the act itself.

An act of violence can, at least in theory, be a thing that overtakes a person — a terrible impulse, a loss of control, over in a second.

I do not believe that is what happened to me, but I can at least imagine a version of events where it was.

What followed cannot be imagined that way.