I have noticed that the mind does this in the run-up to something bad — offers you, right up until the last second, a door back to the ordinary world, a story in which everything is fine and you can go home embarrassed.

I held that door open the whole drive.

I held it open as I turned onto their street.

And then I saw the house, and the drawn curtains and the chained gate took the door off its hinges, and I never got it back.

Some part of me had known since Thursday, I think, the way you know a thing in your body before you’ll let your mind say it.

That was why I was driving.