I had hated that woman for twenty years. I want to be precise: not disliked. Hated. She was, for two decades, the most vivid person in my life who I had never met — the woman who came forward at the eleventh hour, who took a seven-year-old three states away, who changed a school and a phone number, and who was, in my private accounting, the reason a child ended up at twenty-seven in an apartment with a man who threatened to disappear her.

Sabrina asked me to drive her in September. She was not going for reconciliation. She was going because her therapist had suggested that there were questions only one living person could answer, and because Roberta had had a small stroke in July.

I said, “Are you sure you want me in the car?”

Sabrina said, “I’m sure I want you in the car. I’m not sure I want you in the house.”

Which was correct, and which I want on the record as the single most encouraging sentence anybody said to me all year.

I sat in that car for fifty minutes.