The drive home took twenty-three minutes.
He knew this because he was aware of every one of them — the specific, measured quality of a man sitting inside a decision he has made and examining it from the inside while the Pasadena streets moved past in the low December afternoon light. He drove with both hands on the wheel and the radio off, which was the choice of a man who did not want anything else in the car with him while he thought.
He thought.
The argument came first — the version he trusted, the one built from the factual material of the situation. He had spent a Sunday hiking with a student. He had held her hand on a trail. He had sat on a ridge with her head on his shoulder and his head on hers and felt, in the specific dark of the part of him that had stopped arguing, that it w
