After Driving a Drunk Woman Home, I Realized She Was My Boss’s Daughter
After Driving a Drunk Woman Home, I Realized She Was My Boss’s Daughter
I was sitting on the arm of my own couch, not even on the cushions, just perched there on the edge, elbows on my knees, staring at a woman I had never seen before in my life. She was asleep on her side, curled beneath a fleece blanket I had pulled from the hall closet, wearing a pale blue satin dress that had no business being in my apartment in Kitsilano. Her hair was dark blonde and loose across the pillow. The room smelled like white wine and something floral, expensive. Her purse sat on the coffee table with the zipper half undone and her phone screen was glowing through the fabric. I wasn’t trying to look. I just happened to see the name. Dad – Douglas Hartwell. My stomach went cold before the rest of me understood why.
My name is Owen Stratchen. I am thirty-six years old and I work as a civil engineer for Hartwell Infrastructure Partners, one of the larger project management firms operating in British Columbia. I have been with the company for eight weeks. Douglas Hartwell built it from a two-person consulting shop in the nineties into a firm with eighty employees and contracts spanning the Sea-to-Sky corridor to the island. He is the kind of man who does not raise his voice because he never needs to. The weight of his expectation is enough. I had been aware of him the way you are aware of weather in this province. Constantly present, capable of changing without warning.
I grew up in Nanaimo. My father drove logging trucks. My mother worked early shifts at a Tim Hortons near the highway and came home smelling like coffee and industrial cleaner. They were decent people who believed in two things without reservation. Doing the job properly and not making yourself someone else’s problem. Those two beliefs shaped me in ways I did not fully understand until the night I drove a stranger home.
My first marriage ended three years before this. Quietly and without ceremony. The way things do when two people have been growing in different directions for so long they stop noticing the distance until one of them finally measures it. Her name was Paula. We had five years together and no children. She moved to Calgary when it was done. I stayed in Vancouver in a two-bedroom rental in Kitsilano with creek-stained baseboards and a view of the mountains if you stood on the second rung of the bathroom step stool and leaned slightly left. It was a perfectly decent apartment. A little too large for one person, a little too quiet on Sunday evenings.
My routine was simple. Work, home, cook something from whatever was on sale at the market on Fourth, read until ten, sleep, repeat. I was not miserable exactly. I was steady in the way that still water is steady—calm on the surface, but not moving toward anything. The colleague who disrupted that routine was Priy. She was a project coordinator on my team, had been with Hartwell for four years, and had decided within her first week of knowing me that my social life was an infrastructure problem she was personally going to fix.
The Friday in question, she texted me at 4:30 to say that a group from the office was going to a rooftop bar in Yaletown and that if I said I was tired, she was going to physically show up at my apartment and remove me from it. I went. The bar was busy. It was a warm July evening by Vancouver standards, which means it was overcast but not actually raining, and the string lights on the patio were doing real work. I found a spot near the railing with a view of the inlet and ordered a pint. Priy materialized briefly to confirm my presence, then disappeared into the crowd to be social in the way I had never been able to manage. I was forty minutes into seriously considering the door when I noticed her.
She was sitting at the far end of the bar by herself, dark blonde hair, the blue dress. She was gripping a nearly empty wine glass with both hands and staring at the middle distance with the expression of someone who had just made an irreversible decision and was sitting very still while the reality of it arrived. She was not stumbling or making a scene. She was just alone in the middle of a crowded bar and very clearly had no interest in being approached. The bartender caught my eye and tilted his chin toward her. The question was universal and required no translation. I shook my head to say she was not with me, but I walked over anyway. It was instinct. My mother used to say I had a problem with walking away from things that needed attention.
She looked up when I stopped beside her. Her eyes were red at the corners but dry. I’m fine, she said before I had opened my mouth. I didn’t say anything. You were about to. I was going to ask if that stool was taken. She looked at the empty stool, then back at me. It isn’t. I sat down. We did not talk for almost ten minutes. I drank my pint. She finished her wine and did not order another. At some point, the bartender set a glass of water in front of her without her asking, and she took it without comment, which told me he had been watching her longer than I had.
When she stood to leave, her legs were not entirely reliable. She caught herself on the bar with one hand, not falling but not steady. Do you have someone coming to get you? I asked. She looked at me with the specific blankness of someone who has drunk past the point where the obvious questions have obvious answers. She said something about a place in the West End, high floor, but she couldn’t give me an address. She tried twice and both times trailed off before she reached the street name. I stood there on that patio thinking through my options and did not particularly like any of them. Leaving her was not one I could make myself choose. Calling her an Uber to an address that did not exist was the same as leaving her. The bar was closing out its patio in forty minutes. My apartment was twelve minutes away by car. I made the decision I would spend the next several weeks explaining to people who had not been there to see why it was the only sensible one.
I drove back to Kitsilano in silence. She sat with her cheek against the passenger window, watching the city lights blur past. I helped her from the car up the front steps and through the door. The building has no elevator, just two flights of stairs, and she managed them with her hand on the railing and mine hovering near her elbow without touching. In the apartment, I guided her to the couch, set a pillow under her head, and pulled the fleece blanket over her shoulders. I put a bottle of water on the coffee table. Then I added two Advil on a folded square of paper towel beside it. I was about to go find a book to read in the bedroom when her phone screen lit up through the open flap of her purse. Dad – Douglas Hartwell.
I sat down on the arm of the couch and stayed very still for a moment. Then I went to the kitchen, found a notepad on the fridge, and wrote five lines. You’re safe. This is my apartment. I live here. I’m sleeping in the bedroom with the door closed. Nothing happened. Nothing will. Owen. I folded it twice and set it against the water bottle where she would see it before anything else when she opened her eyes. Then I went into the bedroom, closed the door, put a blanket on the floor along the wall where I would not roll into anything, and lay down. I did not sleep for a long time. I stared at the ceiling and thought about the name on that phone and the eight weeks of employment that now felt considerably more precarious than they had that morning.
She was gone before I woke up. The blanket was folded neatly on the couch. The Advil were missing from the paper towel. The water bottle was half empty. My note was gone. She had taken it with her. I made coffee and stood at the window and told myself it was finished. Strange night. No story. Move forward.
Tuesday of the following week, I was at my desk reviewing load calculations for a drainage project when Priy appeared at the edge of my workstation with the specific expression she wore when she was carrying information she believed I needed. Douglas Hartwell’s daughter is in the building, she said quietly. Apparently, she’s been brought in to help with stakeholder communications on the Squamish contract. I looked up. Vivien Hartwell, Priy said. Have you seen her before?
I had, through the glass partition of the conference room at the end of the hall. I could see her standing at a table with a jacket on and a portfolio in her arms, speaking to two members of the contracts team. She was an entirely different person from the woman on my couch. Her hair was pinned up, her posture was straight, she was pointing at something on a printed map, and the two people across from her were both nodding. She turned her head slightly and our eyes met through the glass. It lasted one second, maybe two. Then she looked back at the map, but she had recognized me. I saw it happen the instant before she controlled it.
Over the following three weeks, Vivien began appearing on the engineering floor with increasing regularity. Her reasons were always legitimate. She was coordinating messaging around the Squamish project and needed to understand the technical scope well enough to talk about it publicly. She sat beside me at my desk twice while I walked her through structural summaries. She asked questions that were sharp and specific and revealed that she had prepared thoroughly before each conversation. Once she showed up with coffee for the whole floor and somehow knew without asking that I took mine with one sugar and no milk. I noticed that she would sometimes stand near the whiteboard when I was explaining something to a junior colleague, not contributing, just listening. I noticed she remembered details from our previous conversations and built on them in the next one. I noticed that when she laughed at something, which was not often, it was brief and genuine and then gone, as though she had not meant to let it out.
We did not speak about the night at the bar. We existed in a professional arrangement we had both silently agreed to maintain. And inside that arrangement, something was growing that neither of us was naming. Small things. She left a cardigan on the back of a chair in the engineering bay one afternoon and I hung it on the hook by the door so it would not get buried. When she came back for it the next morning and found it there, she paused, then glanced at me once, briefly. She did not say anything. But the next time she came to my desk with a question, she brought me coffee without being asked. The trust built in silences and minor gestures, the way trust does between people who are both being careful.
A month in, we were the last two people in the building on a Thursday evening. The cleaning crew had come through at six, and the office was dim and quiet, lit only by desk lamps and the orange glow of the sunset dropping behind the North Shore mountains through the west windows. I was finishing a materials report. She was working at the table in the adjacent meeting room, shoes off, feet tucked under her on the chair. She came to stand in the doorway of my office. Can I ask you something that isn’t about the Squamish project? Go ahead. Why didn’t you call someone that night? You had my phone. My dad’s name was right there.
I set my pencil down. You didn’t know me. Waking up to a missed call from your father because a stranger handed your phone over while you were unconscious—that seemed worse than waking up with a note that told you exactly where you were and what hadn’t happened. She was quiet. The sunset light was coming through sideways and hitting the edge of the table where her hands were resting. You thought about that? she said. I thought about a lot of things that night. She nodded slowly. Me, too.
Then she told me about Brandon. Brandon Wexley was the son of her father’s oldest partner in the firm, the man whose capital had helped Hartwell Infrastructure survive the 2008 contraction. The relationship between Vivien and Brandon had never been arranged in any explicit way, but it had been understood. Their families had overlapped socially for years. Brandon and Vivien had been together for two and a half years. He was not a violent man. He was something more precise and harder to name. He believed—in the way that certain people believe things so deeply they never question the belief—that Vivien was an extension of himself. He approved or disapproved of her friends. He told her, without announcing it as a rule, which restaurants he preferred and which he found unacceptable, and she had gradually stopped suggesting the ones he did not like. He read her messages, not accusingly, just routinely, the way you check a calendar. He spoke about her in front of others in the third person, even when she was standing beside him.
She had ended it the Wednesday before the Friday at the bar. She told him by phone from her car in the parking structure of her building because she had learned in two and a half years to never have difficult conversations with Brandon indoors. He had not accepted it. She had gone to the bar alone that night because she had not known where else to go and could not bear the silence of her apartment in the West End. She ordered wine. She drank too fast and told herself she was celebrating. And somewhere inside the not-quite-celebrating, she had lost track of herself. I wasn’t planning to stay that long, she said. And I wasn’t planning to need anything from anyone. People rarely plan those things. She looked at me for a moment. No, they don’t.
I did not do anything with the weight of what she told me. I sat with it. That is a thing I learned from my father. Some moments ask you to be steady and present, not to produce a response.
Ten days after that conversation, Douglas Hartwell stopped me in the corridor near the project manager’s office. He was holding a folder and his reading glasses were pushed up on his forehead, and he looked at me the way he looked at everything—with the specific attention of a man who was accustomed to finding the load-bearing element in a structure. Stratchen, he said. Mr. Hartwell. I understand you’ve been spending time explaining technical scope to my daughter. She’s been brought in for the stakeholder communications. She asked detailed questions. I answered them. He looked at me for a moment. Keep it professional, he said. Then he walked past me without waiting for a response. It was not a threat. It was not quite a warning. It was the kind of sentence that does not require elaboration because everyone in the building already understands its full meaning.
I did not go near Vivien’s end of the floor for the rest of that week. Priy noticed. She said nothing, which told me she had understood perfectly.
Brandon Wexley arrived at the Hartwell offices on a Monday morning in early September under the official pretext of a partnership review that had been on the calendar for months. He walked through the front door in a gray suit that cost more than I spent on rent, shook hands with everyone he passed as though running for something, and smiled with the ease of a man who has never had to work very hard to be liked. He found his way to the engineering floor. He introduced himself to the team briefly, charmingly, and then his eyes moved across the room and settled on the sight of Vivien standing near my desk, leaning over to look at a site diagram I had opened. That easy smile did not waver, but something behind his eyes went perfectly flat for a fraction of a second. He was not there for the partnership review.
He came back to the office the following Wednesday. He had found something. I still do not know how. A photograph taken by someone in the building parking lot from a distance, showing Vivien and me walking out together at the end of an evening. We were not touching. We were not even particularly close. We were two colleagues walking to our respective cars, but we were talking and she was laughing, and that apparently was enough. He brought the photograph to Douglas Hartwell. I was in the adjacent room when it happened. Close enough to hear the shape of the conversation through the wall without making out the words. The tone I could hear plainly. Brandon’s voice modulated and reasonable—the voice of a man presenting evidence rather than making an accusation. The pause after. Then Douglas’s voice, shorter, quieter.
Two hours later, I was called into Douglas Hartwell’s office. He had the photograph on his desk. He looked at it and then he looked at me and he said, “Explain the context of your relationship with my daughter.” I told him everything exactly as it had happened, with no omissions and no softening—the bar, the address she could not remember, the decision I made and why, the note, the morning. I told him I had not known who she was until I saw his name on her phone, and that I had not acted on it by calling him because I believed waking her with a note was safer and more respectful than escalating a situation she had not consented to escalate. I told him that since then our interactions had been professional and work-related, which was accurate if not entirely complete.
He sat across from me with the photograph face down on the desk and said nothing for long enough that I became aware of the ventilation system and the traffic from the street below. I’ll think about it, he said.
Two days later I was reassigned. Not terminated—reassigned. I was moved to a sister project running out of the Burnaby office, forty minutes east on the Trans-Canada, working on a municipal contract that had nothing to do with anything Vivien was attached to. My desk was cleared, my access badge updated. Priy found me at my car at the end of the day and gave me a look that communicated everything she understood about the situation without either of us saying a word. You’re going to be okay, she said. I was not sure of that, but I thanked her.
Brandon made one personal appearance. He found me in the parking structure of the Burnaby office three days into my reassignment. I do not know how he knew where I was. He was leaning against a concrete pillar with his jacket over one arm, completely relaxed, entirely at home in spaces that did not belong to him. “She’ll come back around,” he said. Not angry, not hostile—conversational. The certainty of a man who had never truly been told no and understood, on a cellular level, that he never would be. “She always does. It’s just a matter of time.” I looked at him. I picked up my bag. I got in my car and I drove to the highway. My hands stayed steady the whole way home. I was proud of that.
The following Monday, a courier envelope arrived at my desk in Burnaby. It was addressed in handwriting I did not immediately recognize. Inside was a single folded piece of paper. On it were six words in clean, careful lettering: I didn’t take the note by accident. I read it four times. Then I folded it back into the envelope and put it in the inner pocket of my jacket and went back to work. But something that had been quietly clenched in my chest for three weeks released a fraction, like a bolt that had been over-torqued finally backing off to the right tension.
I did not reach out. I did not cross whatever line Douglas Hartwell had drawn. I buried myself in the Burnaby project, which was genuinely complex—a stormwater management system for a neighborhood that had flooded twice in eight years and deserved better. I worked long hours. I drove the Trans-Canada in the dark both ways. I ate takeout ramen at my desk and thought about the letter in my jacket pocket approximately once every twenty minutes.
Vivien called me on a Saturday morning three weeks after the envelope arrived. I was at the Kitsilano farmers market with a canvas bag and no particular plan when my phone buzzed with a number I had not saved but recognized. She asked if she could come over. She arrived an hour later in jeans and a canvas jacket with her hair loose, carrying a brown paper bag from a Vietnamese place near the corner of Fourth. She stood in the doorway and said, “I figured you probably eat alone on Saturdays.” Most Saturdays, yes. Me, too.
We sat at my actual kitchen table, which I had cleared for the purpose, and ate pho and spring rolls on a gray Saturday morning with the rain starting up against the windows. At some point during the second bowl she told me the rest of it. She had gone to Douglas Hartwell after my reassignment. She had sat in her father’s office—the same office I had been called into, the same chair—and she had told him everything. Not selectively, not strategically. Everything. Brandon, the two and a half years, the control that left no visible marks but accumulated in you the way damp gets into walls, quiet and comprehensive. The night at the bar and what she was escaping. The moment she had seen me through the bar crowd and felt, for reasons she could not have articulated to a jury, that staying in the vicinity of this particular person was a reasonable impulse to follow. The way I had left a note instead of making a phone call. The way I had answered her questions about shear walls and drainage gradients without making her feel like she was interrupting. The way I had hung her cardigan on the hook by the door.
Douglas had listened. He had not interrupted. He was not pleased. But he had listened, and listening was more than Vivien had expected from him on the subject of her personal life, which he had always treated as infrastructure he had designed and did not need to maintain. She set her chopsticks down carefully on the edge of the bowl. She looked at me with an expression that I recognized from the night at the bar. Open and unguarded and slightly frightened. The way a person looks when they are handing you something that could break them. I need to tell you something, she said. I stopped eating. The night at the bar—I knew who you were.
I looked at her. Priy mentioned you at a company function in June. She pointed you out across the room and said something about the new engineer on her floor who was too serious for his own good. She looked at the tabletop. I noticed you. After that, I looked you up. Company directory, project history. I thought about you more than I had any reason to. She paused. I knew your team was going to that bar on Friday. I went because I knew you would be there.
The rain had picked up outside. I could hear it properly now against the kitchen window. I did not plan to drink that much, she said. I did not plan to need anyone’s help getting anywhere. But I planned to be in the same room as you, and I am not going to sit here and pretend that was a coincidence.
I looked at the woman who had just told me that the most complicated night I had experienced in recent memory was not, at its root, accidental. She had come looking for me. Everything else—the wine, the address she could not find, the name on the phone, the note on the coffee table, the letter in the envelope—had followed from that one decision she had made weeks earlier and never told anyone.
If we do this, I said, your father could decide his patience has limits. She looked at me without looking away. If he reassigns someone for being honest with him, that says more about the company than it does about the person.
I didn’t kiss her that Saturday morning. We washed the bowls side by side at the sink, rain on the windows, the kitchen barely wide enough for two adults to stand in without their shoulders touching. She left at noon. At the door, she turned back. “I left my jacket on your couch,” she said. Do you need it? Not today, she said, and walked down the stairs. I stood at the door for a moment. Then I went to the couch and sat down and looked at the canvas jacket folded over the armrest and felt something I had not felt in a long time. Not happiness exactly. Something quieter and more structural than happiness. The feeling of a foundation that has been properly set.
The first month was ours alone. We did not announce anything. We were two people who ate dinner together on weeknights and walked along the seawall on weekend mornings when it was not actively raining, which in Vancouver narrows the window but does not eliminate it. She started keeping a mug at my place, then a phone charger, then a pair of waterproof boots by the front door because the neighborhood was uneven and her good shoes were not built for it. Each object arrived quietly with no announcement, placed with enough intention that I understood exactly what it meant. She knew which drawer stuck if you pulled too fast and which burner on my stove ran hot. She knew the bathroom faucet needed an extra quarter turn to fully close. She knew these things because she paid attention, and she paid attention because she intended to stay.
Two months in, Douglas Hartwell called me on a weekday morning. He asked if I was free for lunch. We met at a Japanese restaurant in downtown Vancouver that he clearly went to regularly because the staff brought his tea without him asking. He ordered without looking at the menu. He sat across from me with the same quality of attention he brought to everything and looked at me for a while before speaking. Vivien told me what happened with Wexley, he said. Before you came to the company. The whole of it. I nodded. I don’t like this situation. He picked up his tea. I want you to know that I don’t like it. I understand. He set the cup down. But I asked you to explain yourself and you told me the truth without hedging it. That is not a small thing.
He did not say he approved. He did not offer his hand or call me anything other than Stratchen. But the sentence he gave me—that telling the truth was not a small thing—was enough to breathe against.
Brandon made one final attempt. Two weeks later, he sent Douglas Hartwell the parking lot photograph again, accompanied this time by a detailed written summary of what he characterized as my inappropriate proximity to Douglas’s daughter and its implications for the firm’s partnership relationships. It was precise and polished and the work of someone who had thought carefully about the most damaging possible arrangement of the facts. Douglas forwarded it to me with three words in the body of the email: already been handled. I read those three words on my phone while sitting at my desk in Burnaby, looking out at the rain coming off the mountains, and I understood for the first time without remainder exactly where Douglas Hartwell had chosen to stand.
Six months after the night at the bar, I was called back to the main Vancouver office to present the final design package for a bridge rehabilitation project on the North Shore. Two years of survey work, load analysis, and environmental assessment, compressed into a sixty-page report that would determine whether a structure built in 1974 could serve another fifty years. The presentation went for forty minutes in the main conference room. Douglas Hartwell was in the room. His two senior partners were in the room. Vivien was in the back corner with her arms folded and her portfolio on the table in front of her. And when I hit the final slide and the room responded the way it did, I looked up and found her watching me with an expression that no one else in that room would have been able to read. I could. It said the same thing the mug and the boots and the letter in the courier envelope had said. I see you. I chose you. I am not going anywhere.
Brandon Wexley did not reappear. I assume he found something else to possess. Some situations resolve not through confrontation but simply through the forward movement of time, which carries the people who are supposed to stay and gradually pulls away the ones who were only ever holding on.
At eight months, Vivien moved in. Not to the West End penthouse—to Kitsilano. The two-bedroom apartment with the baseboards that needed weather stripping and the bathroom where you had to lean left to see the mountains and the kitchen where two people could not pass each other without making contact. She arrived on a Saturday in October with two suitcases and the canvas jacket I had kept folded on my couch since the day she left it there on purpose. She put the jacket on the hook by the front door where her cardigan had hung that evening in the office when I had moved it to keep it from being buried. She straightened it with two fingers. “You’re giving up a lot of square footage,” I said. She looked at the apartment in the way someone looks at a place they have already decided to commit to. “I’m not giving up anything,” she said. “I’m arriving somewhere.”
The jacket has stayed on that hook since. Not lost, not forgotten in a conference room or sent through a courier envelope with a note. Placed there on purpose by a woman who had spent years inside a life where she was managed rather than known, and who had finally found a place quiet enough and ordinary enough to set things down and mean them.
The couch is still there—the same couch she slept on as a stranger the night I drove her home. The same cushions with the same creek when you sit down. She reads on it every Sunday evening, feet tucked under her, a book open across her knees. I sit at the other end, marking up sight drawings with a pencil. The mountains are visible through the window when the weather is clear, which in Vancouver is less often than either of us would prefer, but often enough.
Some nights I think back to that parking lot. The moment I stood under the bar’s awning with a woman who could not tell me her address, working through the decision that would reshape the next several years of my life. Every practical instinct said to call a cab, pick a hotel, let someone else be responsible. But she was cold and I had a car and I knew where my apartment was. So I drove her there. I put water on the table. I wrote five lines on a notepad so that when she opened her eyes, she would know immediately that she was safe and that nothing had been taken from her.
That was all. No calculation, no plan. I just stayed one extra minute and thought about what she would need when she woke up.
She came into my life as a woman I had never met, wearing a dress that had no business being in my car, unable to remember a street name. I gave her my couch and a bottle of water and five sentences on a torn piece of paper. She gave back to me the thing I had not known I was missing. Not a person, not a relationship exactly, but the feeling of moving through days with some direction to them. The quiet certainty that the life you are living is one you have chosen, for reasons that actually belong to you.
Vivien still works at Hartwell Infrastructure Partners. So do I. Douglas Hartwell still does not raise his voice. He still looks at everything with the attention of a man finding the load-bearing element. But last Christmas, at the company dinner, he sat across from me and asked how the bridge project was holding up, and when I told him the expansion joints were performing better than projected, he nodded once and said, “Good. That was good work.” And then he passed me the bread basket, which, from Douglas Hartwell, is practically a hug.
Priy still works there too. She still believes my social life is an infrastructure problem she personally fixed. She is not wrong. She came to our house for dinner last month and stood in the kitchen looking at the canvas jacket on the hook by the door, and then she looked at me and said, “You know, I pointed you out to her at that company function. I was complaining about how serious you were.” And I said, “I know. She told me.” And Priy said, “So technically, this is all my fault.” And I said, “Technically, yes.” And she said, “Good. I’m taking credit.”
The letter is still in the inner pocket of my jacket. The one that said I didn’t take the note by accident. I don’t read it very often anymore. I don’t need to. But sometimes, when I’m looking for my keys or my gloves, my hand finds it, and I remember the Saturday morning it arrived in a courier envelope at my desk in Burnaby, and I remember the bolt that had been over-torqued finally backing off to the right tension.
If you have ever made a decision that looked reckless from the outside and turned out to be the most sensible thing you ever did, I want to hear about it. Tell me in the comments below. And if this story reached you somewhere, if it felt like something, hit the like button, subscribe, and turn on notifications. I put out a new story every week.
Have you ever helped a stranger and found out later it changed your entire trajectory? Or would you have made a different call that night, standing in that parking lot in the rain? Let me know. Because the truth is, most of us don’t get to see the whole story. We make one small decision—a note on a coffee table, a couch offered to a stranger, five lines on a torn piece of paper—and we never find out what it meant. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we do. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the stranger comes back. Sometimes she brings pho on a Saturday morning and tells you she knew who you were all along. And you sit at your kitchen table with the rain on the windows and realize that the most sensible thing you ever did was the thing that looked like a mistake.
That is the story. That is the whole of it. And I would make the same call again, every time.
