Nine times.

Nine years of the twelfth of February.

A day my wife did not want to talk very much, and did not want to go out, and once, in the third year, cried in a car outside a restaurant for ten minutes and then apologized and said she was fine.

I had held her on that day nine times.

She had been at a table in Norwalk with the man in the photograph, or she had not, and either way she had let me put my arms around her.

That is what went through my head at a chain-link fence, and it is not the noblest thing to have thought while my child was on the other side of a wall, and it is what I thought.