A thing that ends in a moment is a thing that was intact until that moment, and the reason I liked that line so much is that it made twenty-two years into a sound marriage with a catastrophe at the end of it, and made me a man who had been ambushed.

I was not ambushed.

I was away a hundred and eighty-one nights a year.

I telephoned a house line and accepted a single source’s account of my own family for seven years.

A neighbour came to my fence in April 2023 and I picked up a toolbox.

My seventeen-year-old asked to leave and I said nine words and let a waitress end it.

I paid off a second mortgage and bought braces and a truck and told myself that was the shape of being a father.