There was no hatred in it.

Hatred, at least, would have granted me the dignity of mattering.

There was only arithmetic.

To Devon I had never been a person he loved or even a person he’d come to resent.

I had been a term in an equation, and the equation had a solution, and the solution was a quiet road and a car that wouldn’t stop.

I think that recording is the reason I never once, in the fourteen months that followed, felt the pull to pity him.