She had to remind herself that she wasn’t superstitious. At some juncture of stepping over cracks and not opening umbrellas indoors, she stopped to realize she had never believed in superstitions. Her mother’s back did not break. Her mother died of cancer, and she was pretty sure there was no corresponding superstition for that. But she had killed a character based on her dad in one of her novels, and then he died, and she wrote about infidelity in that same novel, which obviously killed her marriage as well. So she continued to carry on some ill-considered ideas about the power of her thoughts to create realities. That dad thing we mentioned above fucked her up a bit. For the duration of her marriage she avoided singing heartbreak songs too, as though this would somehow manifest actual heartbreak. Anyway, they went ahead and watched a show called Divorce on their L-shaped sofa and she thinks now maybe that was all too much.