And Carmen said: “Three, Wes.”

I said, “There were two.”

“There were three.”

And she told me about the third one.

In the June of 2014, when Beto was about two weeks old, she had called the office.

Not my mobile.

The office — the landline on the business card, the number on the side of the trucks, which was the one number in the world she knew would still work.

A woman answered.

Carmen did not give a reason.

She said her name was Carmen Abreu and she needed Wes Tolliver to call her back and it was important, and she left her number, and she said it twice, and the woman read it back to her.