The first prong was that it was a nasty story. ‘You bullied an old woman and stole her bookcase,’ she said. I must have flinched, for she added, ‘—is one way of looking at it.’ I nodded for her to continue. ‘In your shoes,’ she pressed on, ‘someone else might be ashamed. But there isn’t a friend of ours you haven’t bragged to about your exploits. And casting yourself as the hero every time, playing up her age and playing it for laughs.’ In our mid-twenties this had seemed charming, she said, but now that I was thirty, and the story hadn’t matured at all, she could no longer ignore the callousness in my treatment of Fredricka. And who knew what our friends were thinking? The way I gloated over this poor, lonely woman, as if she were a cartoon, as if she had it coming to her. ‘Consider it from her point of view. How do you think she tells the story to her friends?’ Fredricka did not have any friends, though I resisted the temptation to say so. Michelle gestured to the space beside the sofa, as if insinuating a scene, and I realized that she was waiting for me to imagine the woman telling the story to her friends. I stared into the space, taking a sip of whiskey, and visualized three blue-haired ladies sitting around Fredricka, covering their mouths in polite gapes of horror. I said I supposed I’d look like the bad guy, from her point of view. ‘Right,’ Michelle said. ‘Like a thief and a bully. A tormentor. Antagonizing her.’ Even without the proviso against interjecting mid-prong, I knew this would have been a bad time to correct her, for instance by noting that I could not have been a ‘thief,’ since the bookcase was rightfully mine, or that Fredricka had been the one who bullied and tormented me. That that was the whole point of the story. I took another, larger sip from my tumbler, inhaling deeply before I drank: the bouquet was strong, and the bourbon burned. I nodded again for her to go on. That was all, she said. For five years she had listened idly by as I regaled everyone with this monologue, and before tonight she’d simply never wanted to be a scold about it.

But now, she said—and this was the second prong—she felt she had to say something. Because here I was, about to go on national radio and tell my version of events to a sympathetic host, and not only that, but to a sympathetic audience, which must number into the millions once you account for podcast subscribers. Had I even considered the fact that Fredricka herself might come to hear it? How did I think she would feel if one day she turned on the radio and heard her bully’s voice, blithely narrating one of her most traumatic experiences, all while Ira Glass snickered away? It was one thing to monopolize a narrative in our living room—one thing, among friends, to embellish a story—but…