It was not a decision he had ever consciously made; it had simply arranged itself into the architecture of his life.

When Winnie needed a checkup, he found a clinic in a strip mall.

When he’d broken a finger on the job, he’d taped it himself rather than sit in an emergency room.

He had built four years of small detours around a single unbearable place, and he had told himself it was nothing, a preference, when it was in fact a wound he had never let close.

Because the last time those doors had opened for him, they had opened onto the worst months of his life — onto the slow subtraction of his wife, the machines, the whispered corridor conversations, the chair he had slept in, the morning a doctor had walked toward him with a particular expression and he had known, from across the hall, before a word was said.

That smell was not just a smell.