I wrote it down, as I said I would.

It took three weeks and it ran to fourteen pages and I gave it to Jessi in a coffee shop in the middle of January, and she read it over about four days and then we talked about it for two hours in the same coffee shop.

It was an accounting.

Not an apology — there is one paragraph of apology in fourteen pages and it is at the end and it is four sentences long, because she had told me, on the porch, in the coldest voice I have ever heard her use, that she did not want a long apology and that a long apology is a thing you do for yourself.

What it was, was a list of everything I had done and everything my mother had done, separated, in order, with dates, so that she could see the shape of it.