Which is what makes my willingness to believe the worst of Jacqueline that morning so strange, and so instructive.

I loved this woman.

I had lived with her, gladly, for half a year.

And it still took me less than a minute to cast her, in the theater of my own panic, as a hardened criminal.

Love, it turns out, is not the same thing as trust, and it is certainly not the same thing as a calm mind, and a frightened person will believe astonishing things even about people they love.

Then came the supply delays, and the contractor delays, and the this-part-is-back-ordered delays, and three or four weeks stretched, impossibly, into six entire months.