There was no panic in it.

No are you all right, no which hospital, no breath held.

There was only the flat annoyance of a man whose evening had been mildly inconvenienced.

I looked at the call log while he talked.

Fifty-two times.

He had called fifty-two times, and not one of those calls had been to ask whether I was alive.

I want to sit with that number for a moment, because I have since, many times.

Fifty-two calls is not the act of a man who is worried.

Fifty-two calls is the act of a man who is used to being obeyed and has met, for the first time, a delay.

Somewhere across the city a phone had rung in an emergency room while a stranger stitched my leg, and instead of that silence prompting a single question — is she hurt, is she in danger, why isn’t she answering — it had prompted only mounting irritation, call after call after call, each one a small hammer-tap on a door he expected to open.

I had spent three years mistaking that need for control for a kind of love.

Lying on the gurney with the number glowing at me, I finally saw it plainly for what it was.

Chapter 2 — The Line I Finally Drew

“I’m in the emergency room,” I said.