He said the line anyway — it was loaded, it fired on reflex — but even as it left his mouth some part of him registered that it was landing on the wrong person, that this shivering woman was not the villain of the story he’d been telling himself for four years.

And her answer unmade him further.

She did not fight.

She did not explain.

She said thank you, for the soup, to the man who had just mocked her in a bread line, and she walked away.

It was the dignity of it that undid him.