Not until Tuesday.” He nodded slowly.

“I keep waiting to be angry at you for blowing it all up,” he said.

“But you didn’t blow it up.

He did.

You just turned the lights on.” We sat together in that turned-on light for a long while, two people who had trusted the wrong person and were learning, in real time, that being deceived is not the same as being a fool.

That was the conversation I had been dreading most, and it turned out to be the one that saved me.