“I have the big quarterly presentation at nine.” For a second I genuinely thought I had misheard him over the noise of the room, the crying and the coughing and the low television bolted to the wall.

I looked at him, at the top of his bent head, at the phone glowing in his hand, and I waited for the sentence to mean something other than what it had plainly meant.

It did not.

I have gone over that beat many times, the second I understood he was not misheard, and what strikes me is how completely his mind had partitioned the two things.

In one compartment sat our daughter, burning with fever in an emergency room.