“I don’t know what he understood.

I do know that none of it is because of anything you did.”

She considered that with a seriousness only small children can manage.

Then she asked whether Chicago had dinosaurs.

I laughed.

“Not the live kind.”

Later, when she was asleep, I opened the green folder again.

I looked at the distant, formal response from the law office and wondered whether I had mistaken a closed door for something that would never open.