He sat there for what I would estimate was eight seconds with his mouth slightly open, running something, and I watched him look for a version of the answer that would work.

“That’s what I thought,” I said, and I stood up.

I packed a case that night.

Not everything — four days of clothes, my laptop, the folder with the deed and the mortgage statements in it, and, from the bookshelf in the spare room, a shoebox.

The shoebox had two things in it.

An ultrasound photograph from twenty-two weeks, and a knitted hat, yellow, that a nurse at Sharp had put on my daughter before she gave her to me for the eleven minutes I had her.

Logan followed me to the door and said my name four times and did not physically stop me, and I drove to Clara’s in Chula Vista at three in the morning, and my sister opened the door in a bathrobe and did not ask a single question until Sunday afternoon.