She has asked twice.

The second time she asked, I said: “You don’t get to have it, because you’re the only person on earth who didn’t need it.

You knew in the February, standing in a doorway, and you knew in the summer when you turned a photograph over.”

Part Eleven: Telling Him

Carmen set the terms and I agreed to every one of them and it is the only stretch of this where I behaved correctly the whole way through.

The terms were: she told him, not me.

She told him at home.

There was a professional involved, a family therapist named Adele Fontanez, who saw Carmen twice on her own first, and then Carmen and Beto together, before anything was said to him at all.

And the timing was hers.

I asked, once, in the December, whether we were close, and she said, “Wes, if you ask me that again I’ll push it back a month,” and I did not ask again.