I had come back from ten days at Fort Irwin and I was in that state you’re in after a rotation, which is not tired exactly but hollowed out, and I had gotten home at nine at night to find Hannah asleep and the kitchen clean and Pamela at my table with a glass of wine and a stack of Hannah’s school papers she’d been sorting.

And she asked me about Rebecca.

Not carefully.

Not in the way people ask, which is to check whether you’re all right.

She asked me what Rebecca had been like to argue with.

Nobody had ever asked me that.