‘Oh no!’ Ira said. ‘She actually said that? You must have felt awful.’

‘Tell him,’ Michelle added, ‘tell what happened when you were moving.’

‘When I was moving?’

‘Her son,’ she said.

My face flushed with shame. I looked to Michelle in appeal, but her own expression was blank and severe. In that moment I understood how thoroughly she’d prepared for this. ‘Go on,’ she insisted. ‘Tell him.’

I had never told this part of the story to anyone else. In truth, it wasn’t even ‘part’ of this story—not a coda or capstone—but its own narrative altogether. ‘The Meanest Thing I’ve Ever Said To Anyone.’ It just happened to involve Fredricka.

It was my final day in the apartment. I’d already moved the bookcase and was returning for the last of my boxes when Fredricka came into my room to discuss my safety deposit. There would have to be deductions, she informed me. With undisguised glee she began to itemize the different messes I had left: I hadn’t washed one of the pillowcases—she would charge me for that; there was the broken plate—she would charge me for that; I’d left a crumpled Post-it in the wastebasket—she would charge me for that. And so on. I played along: ‘What exactly am I paying for?’ I asked. ‘The labor of emptying the trash?’ Oh, she cooed, I’d find out soon enough—I’d see what she charged for her services. Finally, in her obvious coup de grâce, she casually mentioned that I would also be paying for ‘that bookcase that you stole.’ I laughed outright. So this had nothing to do with the lease or the deposit: it was simply her way of getting the last word in. ‘The police declared it mine,’ I reminded her. She was ready for this: ‘They had no right! It wasn’t their jurisdiction!’ I asked how much she proposed to charge for it, a piece of trash left on the street. Seventy dollars, she said—half what her neighbor claimed to have paid. This was so idiotic that I became incandescent with rage. Yet I said nothing, for I knew that the price was arbitrary. There was no point disputing it. This was the last word—at least where the bookcase was concerned—and I let Fredricka have it. But as I was walking out of the flat, I turned a final time to look at her. She was standing in the hall, watching me go, her arms crossed. Her dumb face sagged, as if in sadness. I felt it as a pressure building inside me. Before slamming the door, I shouted back to her—shrieked, actually—‘I HOPE YOUR SON ROTS IN HELL!’

Every year or so, while lying in bed, I remember this sentence—I picture Fredricka in the hall, stung by my pointless cruelty—and I wince.

The night I told Michelle this story, early on in our relationship, I warned her that she would think less of me for hearing it. I even made her promise never to tell any of our friends. So when in our living room that afternoon she encouraged me once again to tell Ira, I looked at her in confusion. I couldn’t believe she was bringing this up now, for me to broadcast on national radio. Except of course she was bringing it up. She’d likely come to the interview with nothing else in mind: simply to ensure that the story was told from all sides, that both Fredricka and I were characterized as fully, as comprehensively, as possible. If this meant disclosing the evilest thing I ever said to her, or indeed to anyone, then so be it. And if I wasn’t willing to tell Ira—if I feigned forgetfulness—Michelle would be happy to tell him herself.