Carmen and Beto lived in a two-bedroom on the north side of a complex off Airport Boulevard.

My northeast yard — the one I had opened in 2017, the one I drove to two or three times a week for four years — is eleven minutes from her front door.

I have driven past the entrance to that complex, by my own estimate, somewhere between five and eight hundred times.

Beto’s school is nine minutes from that yard.

Their grocery store is the H-E-B I use.

The urgent care they went to when he broke his wrist at five is in the same strip as the tire place that does my pickup.

For four years my ex-wife and my son lived inside a circle I drove through twice a week.

People hear that and say Austin’s a big city, and it is, and that is not the point.

The point is that I had constructed, over eight years, an entire picture of where Carmen was, and the picture had her somewhere else.

Somewhere far.