I know that it’s perverse, the pleasure I get from this whole process. That’s why I’ve told this story as many times as I have, to so many different people. It’s one of those pleasurable if not quite healthy compulsions, like picking obsessively at your cuticles. Once, riding the bus, I saw a young woman across from me frowning at her bare forearms until at last she could no longer stand what she saw. She pulled out a set of tweezers and started plucking at the invisible hairs of her arm. It went on for a full ten minutes — just plucking and plucking at herself without once looking up. My compulsion to tell this story has always felt a little like that. Although I’ve never told it this thoroughly or ruthlessly before, which I think means I’ll be done with it for good once you and I are finished here.

When there’s a gun in a story, the wisdom goes, it has to go off. That’s another thing this story does wrong, because Noel’s gun never even made an appearance. For the second time since it was evoked, the Remington remained locked away in its cabinet — it turned out Noel had never managed to unearth the key. He’d taken a good look around for it after Arun Gill’s garage was broken into, become frustrated when it didn’t turn up, and then forgotten all about it, as busy and distractible people will.

That said, the gun still worked. It still managed to work its annihilating magic — the magic guns bequeath to every story, true or fake. The ability to bring things to an end.

It wasn’t so much my informing Trevor that Noel had gone to get his shotgun that ended our standoff — it was simply that now somebody knew. Thanks to the moment of Trevor being distracted by falling pots. I was able to say to Noel: Can you go get your shotgun? And, in the next moment: I can’t leave Kelli here alone. Twelve words that punctured the bubble of unreality my sister and I had been trapped inside for the past sixteen hours. Noel’s eyes flared in that moment of comprehension, and he fast-limped across the street, carrying the truth of our situation with him. As he went rummaging through his house, Noel babbled what was happening to his wife — a level-headed woman (in contrast to her excitable husband), whose name, I would later learn, was Phyllis. And it was good old cool-as-a-cucumber Phyllis who called the police.

· · ·

Trevor left, and that was the end of our time in the bubble, yes. But it wasn’t the end. The ending just went on and on — in fact, for a while there it didn’t feel like much of an ending at all. There would be police reports. Court appearances. Brief jail time. Then the reappearances, followed by restraining orders. There would be long, pleading emails and Facebook messages, notes in all-caps slipped beneath my windshield wipers, all in violation of the restraining orders, even three years later. Over those years, information would come tumbling out of places like Bestlife, the police, and Eleanor Mallon like so many pots from a high cupboard. News that Trevor had done this sort of thing, to a lesser degree, with home care clients before us (“got a little clingy,” in the enraging words of Margot) and Bestlife had looked the other way. That his wife, Leanne, had taken out a restraining order on him too, more than one, well before I did. That Trevor had a habit of picking Mike up from school on days that did not accord with his custody agreement — one of those was the day he brought Mike over for a barbecue with Kelli and me, which maybe explains why Trevor was so on edge that day.