One year after my divorce, I ran into my ex-husband in the pediatric wing of the hospital where I worked

of theirs, and a bottle broke, and a lot of frightened people had to watch two adults have a divorce in front of them.

The sister on that floor is called Bernadine and she is sixty and she has worked there twenty-two years, and she got everybody moved and the floor cleared inside about ninety seconds, and then she came and found me in the sluice and said: “Right. Breathe.”

That is what actually happened. There was no applause. There was a woman of sixty with a mop.

And I