“Totally. Sorry, Mason. Tell Ruby I said hi.”

I hung up and sat in my car in my own driveway for nine minutes without turning the engine on.

And what I felt was not what I expected to feel.

What I felt was almost relief, and the relief was this: I am not crazy.

Nine years of being told that a thing I could see was not there — the coldness, the comments, the looking-at-the-plate — had left me with a permanent low-grade doubt about my own instrument.

And here, finally, was a fact.