She had been dumped badly and I sat on the floor of her apartment in North Park for six hours, and at about three in the morning she said something I did not think about again until 2024.

She said: “The thing I’m actually scared of isn’t being alone.

It’s getting to fifty and having nothing to point at.”

I said something reassuring.

I was twenty-seven and had no idea what she was telling me.

The third is the soup.

In August 2022, after the second retrieval, she drove me back from Newport Beach because Christopher had a board dinner he could not move — and I want to note, four years later, that I was the one who told him not to move it.

She got me home and put me on the sofa and did not say a single one of the things people say.