There is a particular kind of cruelty that wears the costume of care.

It doesn’t arrive with a sneer or a raised voice. It arrives with a smile. It arrives with the specific performance of someone who has convinced themselves that what they’re doing is actually a kindness, or a joke, or a wake-up call, or any number of other words that allow them to look in a mirror without seeing what they are. It knows exactly where to find the wound. It has done its research. It goes directly to the most tender place and then holds up its hands and says: what? I was just trying to help.

Patricia Caldwell had been doing this version of cruelty to me for six months.

Not always. Not every day. She was too careful for that. She spaced it out with warmth and helpfulness and the occasional genuine kindness, so that when she landed one of her small precise strikes, I was always slightly off-balance — surprised, again, that the pleasant woman who had helped me address wedding invitations was also the woman who could hand me a glass of wine with innocent eyes and say oh, I keep forgetting.

She didn’t keep forgetting.

Patricia never forgot anything.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me tell you about the ten years first. Because the ten years are the point. The ten years are what this whole story is actually about.

Not as a burden.

As a fact of what I am.

I think about Carol in the basement of St. Augustine’s, about you can put it down in pieces.

I have been putting it down in pieces for ten years.

Some pieces I am still putting down.

The jar is on the shelf.

The shelf is mine.