She checked her wristwatch twice in ten seconds.

“I need to tell you something,” she said.

I sat next to her on the hard stone wall, my work boots on the gravel border.

“What is it?”

“I was nine when my grandfather died,” Mariana said.

Her voice was flat and measured, with no rise or fall at all.

“At the reception after the funeral, everyone was sitting in the dining room eating dinner.”

She pulled a loose blue thread from the seam of her scrub pants.