That’s when I almost killed us.

Things that change your life—things that change your world—rarely come with a warning. They broadside you like an eighteen-wheeler at an intersection. In football that’s called clipping. It’s highly illegal. A substantial penalty. But the universe plays by no rules, or at least none that make sense to those of us bound by time and physics.

The truck in question barreled into the intersection after my car clearly had possession. Its horn blared, and I knew slamming on the brakes would guarantee a bloody T-boning, so I punched the accelerator instead, to get far enough in front of it. The truck never slowed down as it flew through the intersection. It missed us by inches.

Now I slammed on the brakes. By the time we came to a stop, we were twenty yards down the street, and the truck had gone its unmerry way. Even though we were at a complete standstill now, I was still gripping the steering wheel in white-knuckle mode, trying to confirm that we were still, indeed, alive.

“Jeez, Ash, what the hell is wrong with you?” Norris blurted, now that it was over. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

“Just you,” I told him. “Fail.” I hoped a little snark might bring us back to a normal headspace, but it didn’t.

And then Norris said, “You totally ran that stop sign.”

“No, I didn’t. There wasn’t one.”

But when I looked behind us, I saw the backside of a familiar octagonal sign. I thought back to driving class. Our instructor told us that most accidents are human error. Today I was the human error.

I looked around to see who else had witnessed my profoundly bad driving. The only person on the street was a skinny guy on a skateboard. He rolled past, oblivious of the near miss. Turns out that skater was not oblivious at all, but I didn’t know that yet. For the time being he was just a dude on a skateboard. Easy to ignore. Easy to forget. For now.

I eased onto the accelerator and resumed our trip, driving much more cautiously than before. Yet in spite of how carefully I was driving, I almost missed the next stop sign as well. I leaned on the brakes—not enough to alert Norris to the fact that I almost ran a stop sign again, but enough to make the stuff on the back seat slide forward to the floor. And that’s when I noticed it. The thing I hadn’t noticed at the previous intersection, because that stop sign was already behind me when I looked; all I had seen was the stainless steel back of it.