It simply isn’t there. He walked out of that building, drove for two days, and started over, and the world let him.

I sat with that for about a week and it took something apart in me that I have not entirely rebuilt.

Because for five years I had believed — not consciously, I would have denied it if you’d asked — that the speech had *done* something.

That there was a version of Thomas Higgins somewhere out there living inside the consequence. That the projector screen had followed him.

It hadn’t. It never does. The auditorium fixed my record. It didn’t touch his.

Laura found me at the kitchen table at two in the morning with the laptop open on the beach photograph, and she read it over my shoulder and then closed it, gently, the way you’d close a door on a sleeping child.