“Okay.”

“That goes in a drawer and we never need it again.”

And then she said, “Don’t show it to your mother.”

I said, “She’s going to want to see it.”

“I know she is.

That’s why.”

I did not understand that for about a month, and then I did.

A piece of paper like that, handed to Loretta Tolliver, would not have been evidence.

It would have been an ending — a document that settled everything, after which she could say well, it’s all resolved now and begin the long process of becoming a woman to whom an unfortunate thing had happened.

My mother has never seen that report.