I don’t regret it.

What was behind that door broke something in me for about a season, and it needed to break, and it was never going to break on its own, because I had spent nine years being exactly competent enough to keep a machine running that was quietly costing me everything.

A receipt fell out of a pocket.

That’s all it was.

Two hours, printed on a slip of paper in a font from 1974, in the right-hand pocket of a jacket I ironed myself at six-forty in the morning.

And it cost me a husband, a Sunday table, two friends, and a supermarket.

And it gave me back a woman I had put in a wooden box with a brass clasp when I was twenty-three, and left in a basement, and genuinely forgotten was down there.