The gate on that street has no intercom.

It is four feet high, it is wooden, it sticks slightly in the wet, and it is mine.

And the only thing I would say to the woman who sat in a Honda at the end of a dead-end road for fifty minutes, rehearsing eleven words and then saying different ones, is not that she should have been braver.

It is that she should have made one telephone call on the Tuesday, and that the four minutes she did not spend cost her three days, and that she was never, at any point, standing on a porch with nothing.

She just hadn’t checked.