At half-past twelve on Monday morning I rose for the first of three journeys to the water closet, each one slicing deeper into the thin rest the night had offered. My stomach had turned against me, and the affliction held me fixed upon the seat until the hour came when I must leave for work.

At a quarter past three I forced myself from the sheets, stood under the shower, and dressed with the slow care of a man who expects no kindness from the day ahead. Before heading to work, I took a small bag of queso fresco my daughter-in-law had bought the day before, believing the mild cheese might quiet the rebellion in my bowels once I was on the road.

I set a piece upon my tongue and knew at once that it had spoiled. The taste rose like a sudden betrayal and nearly made me retch.

I spat the morsel back into the bag. From that moment the truck carried the heavy sour stench of ruined milk, a presence that clung to the back of my throat and filled every breath as I drove.

Along Pyramid Highway I passed a black sport-utility vehicle with its front end crushed and all four doors standing open in the night. I saw no second car and supposed a drunkard had struck something unseen while traveling the wrong way.

Later, at the radio station, I searched the Nevada State Police listings and found no report of any crash. Still, I told my listeners that the northbound lanes of Pyramid were closed, though I understood nothing of the true cause.

At six o’clock I began the broadcast with the rotten taste still lingering and a private grumble in my mind about the cheese and the unexplained highway interruption.

That same half-past twelve had marked another beginning only a few miles away. A teenage girl sat inside a moving automobile near Veterans Parkway and East Greg Street when her father fired into her mother.

The girl called the emergency number and told the dispatcher that she remained in the vehicle and that her mother was critically hurt. Officers found the car on Los Altos Parkway in minutes.

The father refused the command to stop and fled. The pursuit carried them onto Pyramid Highway, where a cruiser brought the vehicle to a halt.

Inside, the father ignored every further order and turned the weapon upon himself. He died where he sat.

The mother, struck by multiple rounds, was carried to a hospital and there breathed her last. The girl was lifted, physically unharmed, from the wreckage of her family.

I learned the truth only after the day had advanced. The portion of Pyramid Highway closed from half-past twelve until six o’clock had been sealed not by an ordinary wreck but by the final acts of a homicide and a suicide.

That evening I stood before the mirror and felt the full weight of my earlier complaints. The spoiled cheese, the repeated risings in the night, the sour smell that would not leave me, the uncertainty about the closed road—all of it shrank to nothing beside the hours endured by the girl who had watched her world end between one minute and the next.

I had spoken of inconvenience; she had spoken into a telephone while blood and pursuit and death filled the darkness around her. The difference left me silent and ashamed as I lay in bed last night.