I walked toward that restaurant that morning irritated and tired and braced for one more small indignity, mentally rehearsing whatever new complaint Julian had for me, calculating how the lost four hundred dollars was going to reshape my month.

I was thinking about groceries.

I was thinking about the bus fare.

I was thinking about all the small desperate things that filled my mind in those years, and not one part of me sensed that I was walking through the last ordinary morning of my old life, that within an hour everything I understood about my own history and my own future was going to be torn up and rewritten.

The enormous moments arrive dressed as ordinary ones.