Someone behind her blasted his horn. She hit the gas, surged across the bridge.

Her face was suddenly hot. With shame. Oh God, oh shit. She’d done that. They had. Crippled an old fellow. Innocent old fellow. She’d made—well, she’d made an already unfortunate person’s crappy life that much harder.

She had.

For real.

God, the hours of her life she’d spent trying to be good. Standing at the sink, deciding if some plastic tofu tub was recyclable. That time she’d hit a squirrel and circled back to see if she could rush it to the vet. No squirrel. But that didn’t prove anything. It might have crawled off to die under a bush. She’d parked the car and looked under bush after bush until a lady came out of a hair salon to ask if she was okay.

Walking through the mall, trying to offer a little positive vibe to everyone she passed. Refilling the dog’s water because there were floaters in it. As if he cared. But maybe, on some level, he did. Maybe clean water made his life better? Incrementally? Sometimes she’d refold Derek’s little shirts two or three times, wondering which way he’d find easiest to unfold. It mattered. Didn’t it? When a shirt unfolded nicely and went right on, didn’t that maybe give a kid an extra little burst of confidence?

How many shirts did you have to thoughtfully refold and how many staples did you have to pick up off the floor so nobody would get a staple in the foot and how many hours did you have to spend in the store trying to decide which fruit punch had the least high-fructose corn syrup and how many frazzled young moms with babies did you have to let cut in front of you at the post office and how many rude rejection letters did you have to decline to respond to just as rudely and how many nice familial meals did you have to put together while a great story idea sat dying in your mind, to offset one case of hobbling a hapless old—­

The world was harsh. Too harsh. Make one mistake, pay for it the rest of your life. She thought of Mary Tillis, who’d rear-ended that minivan and two kids had died. Of Mr. Somers, who’d done something weird with the heater and gassed his elderly parents. Of that guy with the eye patch at Boy Scouts, who’d sloppily secured a load of firewood and then a chunk flew through this lady’s windshield and she’d driven off the bridge into the river and drowned while trapped in her car.