You can talk her into the dark for a year, or three, or ten.

But the knowledge of what she is does not die in there.

It waits, the way my father’s forty percent waited in a box under a stack of old toys, patient and quiet and wholly intact, for the day she remembers to open the folder.

My father, I think, understood something about this that I did not learn until it was almost too late.

He never lectured me about Barrett; he was not that kind of man, and he died before the worst of it.