I worked four years of overtime and paid sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars so my wife could graduate with no debt. The printed programme in my jacket pocket had another man’s name in it.

PART 2 — THE MARCH
That is the part that finished it, and it was not the microphone.

Those dedications are submitted on a form. The registrar’s office collects them, checks the spelling, and sends them to the printer.

The deadline was the fourteenth of March.

Eleven weeks.

She filled in a form eleven weeks before that ceremony, in a name that is not mine, and then lived in my house for eleven weeks knowing that three thousand booklets were being printed with it in them and that I was going to be in that building.

She did not think I would open it. I have never once in my life read a programme at anything.

That is not a woman in a moment at a microphone.

That is a form, a deadline, a proof copy, and seventy-seven days.