The Sixteen Seconds
My ex-wife is thirty-six.
We were married for six years and divorced for three at that point.
She looked like a person who had not slept since Saturday, which she had not.
She stood up when I came in and she said, “Nico.”
And I said, “Don’t wake her.”
Then I said, “Come out to the hall.”
We stood in a corridor outside a pediatric room at six-twenty at night and I asked her one question, which I had chosen on the plane out of about nine.
I said: “What time did it happen and what time did she get here?”