“Your coat’s buttoned wrong,” I told him, because it was, and because it was the kind of thing I would once have crossed a room to fix and now only named, from my chair, and left him to fix himself.

He looked down at his coat.

Then he looked back at me, and his face came apart, and he said, “Henrietta.

I didn’t know you were sick.” And I said, “No.

You didn’t know a lot of things about me.

That was rather the problem.” Not cruelly.