Not one of them is about you.

He described four hours of his own interior weather and there is no version in any of it where he pictures a woman one floor down for fifty-one hours.

“He didn’t fail to tell you.

He never located you in it at all.”

Part Fifteen: Lorna

I went to see my mother-in-law on my own, in her kitchen in Verona, on a Saturday in the November, and it lasted about fifty minutes and it is the only conversation the two of us have had about any of it.

Lorna Renfrew was sixty-four and had been a middle school principal for twenty-two years and a vice principal before that, and she is a woman who has spent her entire adult life being the person who decides what a distressed person is told and when.