Eight years.

She had cut her hair to the shoulder and she had reading glasses on, which she did not have when I knew her, and she was wearing a denim jacket I recognized, which is a detail I have never been able to get past — a denim jacket I had bought her at an outlet mall outside Seguin in 2013, still in service eight years later, on a woman I had spent eight years assuming had a different life.

She saw me.

She did not look shocked.

That is the part I was least prepared for.

She looked at me the way you look at a bill you knew was coming.

“Wes.”

“Carmen.”

And then my mother came out of the restaurant behind me.

I have thought about the next four seconds more than almost anything in my life.