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"So you're going to—"

"I'm going to stand there," Blaine said, "and be a lawyer at them."

And I sat in the passenger seat of my ex-husband's car in a borrowed coat, dripping pond water onto his floor mat, and felt something come up through my chest that I want to describe accurately.

It was not romantic. I want that on the record, because everything else in this story is romantic and this specifically was not.

It was recognition.

Because there was a version of my life — six years of it — in which a thing went wrong and this exact man put a folder in my hands and told me what he was going to do about it. And I’d forgotten this part. Not the fact of it. The feeling of it. I spent two years on a boat remembering the fights, because that is what you take with you. That's what's portable.

I had entirely forgotten what it was like to be on his side of a disaster.

"You're staring at me," he said.

"You said fourteen minutes."

"What?"

"To the dispatcher. You told Steven there's a gate code and you gave him the number off the top of your head, and you told him to stand at the top of the drive." I looked out the windshield. "You have never called an ambulance to that house in your life."

Blaine didn't say anything for about a mile.

"I've thought about it," he finally murmured. "The drive is nine-tenths of a mile. It's unpaved and there's no sign marking the turn. I've thought about it every time either of my parents has had a birthday for about a decade. How unsafe that driveway is."

"Have you told them?"

"I have told my father repeatedly."

"And?"

Blaine sighed. "Dad says asphalt is a kind of violence against the land."

* * *

The waiting room had six people in it and a television nobody was watching. We’d been there for hours.

Blaine was a lawyer at them for about twenty minutes and it was, I have to say, magnificent. Nobody raised a voice. Nobody was rude to anybody. A woman at a desk went from are you family to of course, Mr. Cauthorne somewhere in the middle of a single sentence.

I changed in a bathroom into a Marin General Hospital T-shirt a nurse gave me and put my ruined shirt in a plastic bag. Then I came back out and sat down next to my ex-husband on a row of joined chairs, and we waited.

At twenty past nine a woman came through the doors at a run.

Small, sixty-ish, dressed in whatever she'd had on when the phone rang, holding a purse wrong. She got two steps into the room and stopped and looked around the way you do when you've been driving with your heart racing and you suddenly can't remember what you came in for.

Blaine was up before I was.

"Simona."

"Mijo." Then a great deal of Spanish, very fast, none of which I got except my own name and the word agua.

"He's all right." Blaine had both her hands. "He's all right, I've seen him. Esteban's awake, he's talking, and he's complaining about the fish. He has a cut on his head and they've stitched it. They think there's a concussion and they want to keep him a few hours to watch him, and that is a precaution, Simona. That's all that is."

"They said head—"

"I know what they said."

"On the phone they said head—"