He was right. Every word of that is correct and it is what a decent man says.

And I sat at his kitchen table and felt something I could not name for about four days, and what it turned out to be was this: he had reached for the answer that let me off, immediately, in under a second, without asking a single question first.

I had told him something that had taken me three weeks to be able to say out loud, and he had solved it before I finished.

I told him that, eventually, in June, after Atlanta and Ohio and Savannah — that I had needed him to sit in it with me for about a minute before rescuing me from it.

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “I don’t think I know how to do that.”

“I know.”