I had spent the whole evening letting small wrong things drift past me, the way you let a draft go unexplained rather than get up and find the window.

The folder was the window.

It was the first thing concrete enough to put my hand on, the first wrongness with a shape and a name — the record of my mother’s property, the one piece of the world that was indisputably mine, being carried out of a room against my asking.

Everything that had been vague about the evening gathered itself around that brown folder and became, for the first time, a thing I could refuse.

“Keith,” I said.