I did not look at him.

I had told him not to look at me, and he didn’t.

I spent the four hours in a strange, suspended calm.

I read the same page of a novel a dozen times.

I helped Lily color a cartoon elephant and admired her refusal to stay inside the lines.

I let Julian tell me about the renovations he wanted to make to the lake house, and I made the right sounds in the right places, and some distant part of me marveled that I could do it, that I could sit hip to hip with this man for four hours and betray nothing, when inside me a countdown was running.

I had read once that the hardest acting is not the big scene but the small sustained ordinariness, the hours of behaving normally while carrying something enormous, and I understood it now from the inside.