I stared at her.

She continued.

“I am not asking you to forgive him.”

“I am not asking you to leave him.”

“And I am not going to tell you what happened when neither of us knows the whole truth yet.”

Then:

“But you deserve facts.”

That was the first useful thing anyone said to me that day.

PART 2 — THE WOMAN WHO ALREADY KNEW ME

I kept returning to Samantha’s sentence.