Because the relief meant I had, for one instant, needed the paper.

It meant that somewhere in the exhaustion and the fever and the loneliness, this had gotten into me too, this idea that my own truth required a laboratory’s signature to be real.

And I was furious — at him, for making me doubt the water I stood in, and at myself, for the three seconds.

I have thought about those three seconds more than almost anything else in this whole story.

Three seconds of relief.

What did I have to be relieved about?