And there was nowhere for it to go.

That is the specific thing about being lied to by somebody who has died.

You cannot telephone them.

You cannot go round.

You cannot stand in front of them and make them look at you while you say it.

The anger has no object and it does not evaporate.

It stays in the room with you, at full strength, and it goes looking for something, and what it finds is you.

I spent about forty minutes that evening constructing a version in which I had been a fool, and it was extremely easy to construct, because a thirty-two-year-old woman who marries a dying stranger eight days after meeting a piece of cardboard is a story that tells itself.