Oh, Desmond Desmond Desmond. What does he need her to do? Tell him it wasn’t his fault? But the police report said as much, in plain English. He’d been driving like a grown man recently struck by his father. That morning, his father had sprung at him but had been too out of sync with himself to land the punch. “It happens,” the nurse said mildly, as if referring to matters of the toilet. It happens? Desmond repeated to Gemma in the corridor. That someone who’s always loved you, pretty well without pause, suddenly and certainly ends their subscription?

It does happen. You look at a person you’ve known and who has known you—a person with whom you’ve shared an understanding beyond language, a person whose smell comes out of your own pores—and you want to protect your memories with them. Which is to say, you have no mind to add new ones.