My mother-in-law put her hands on me, then drove me to the emergency room like she was doing me a favor and told the triage nurse I was clumsy. What she did not know is that I spent nine years as a forensic accountant, and that six months earlier I had found the hole in her books — and that the account she had come to my apartment about was one of the places the money sat.

I am not going to describe what happened next in detail.

It took about ninety seconds. It ended against the kitchen counter, and afterwards I could not put weight on my left side, and there was a mark coming up on my face that I could feel before I could see it.

I have thought a great deal about how much to write here and I have decided on that. It happened. It was not a shove. Ninety seconds is a long time.

She picked my car keys up off the island and said: look what you made me do.

Then she drove me to St. Ives Regional herself, talking for the whole eleven minutes about how lucky I was that she had been there, and about a cousin of hers who had waited too long once and lost the use of a hand.

The waiting room was three-quarters full. Fifteen people, about. A man with a towel wrapped around his forearm. A woman wearing two coats. Somebody’s grandfather asleep in a chair by the vending machine with his mouth open.

At the intake desk, the triage nurse looked at my face, and then at my arm, and asked me what had happened.

Verna moved before I could open my mouth.

She stepped up beside me and put her hand around my upper arm. Not hard. Not dramatically. Just there — the way you hold a dog’s collar in a vet’s waiting room, without appearing to.

And she leaned toward the desk with a warm, apologetic little smile and said it loud enough for the whole room:

She’s clumsy. She fell down the stairs. She bruises easily.

Nobody moved. The man with the towel around his arm looked up, and then looked very deliberately back down at the floor.