It was a man declining to spend three seconds.

That is all it would have taken — three seconds to look at his wife of three years and register that she was not a woman who shoved people, that she had said she hadn’t left the house, that a scratch is a strange kind of grievous wound.

Three seconds of the ordinary attention any person owes another.

He did not spend them.

And I have come to believe that this is how most catastrophes between people actually happen — not through some sudden monstrous act, but through a thousand small refusals to look, a long habit of not-seeing that finally meets the one moment where seeing was everything.