All the little cold moments I had translated and excused and set aside were suddenly there together, in one view, and they added up to something I could no longer mistranslate.

This was not a good man having a bad night.

This was who he was, revealed by the pressure of a real crisis the way heat reveals invisible ink.

Our four-month-old had a fever over a hundred and four.

We had been in an emergency room for hours.

And the man beside me was worried about how tired he would look at work.

Chapter 7 — A Quick Phone Call