And somewhere in the following autumn it stopped, and I did not notice it stopping, which is how you know.

I have told that story exactly once at a dinner, and a man said it was charming, and I have not told it since.

It is not charming.

It is four months of a man looking at a child’s eyebrow before saying her name, and the only reason it did not become a wound is that a woman noticed it in week one and waited six weeks to say so in a kitchen at a moment when nobody was upset.

Part Twenty-Three: What I Was Not Allowed to Pay