Naomi Baptiste has run the clinic for eleven years. She read my memo and asked me to come in and shut the door.

“You’ve written four pages and you haven’t recommended anything.”

“I know.”

“Claire. What’s going on.”

So I told her about my grandmother. The whole thing — the Christmas table, the seventy-two hours, Rosa’s check, the litigation, and then, because she waited, the tax bill and the sold house and the six weeks in the desk drawer.

Naomi listened to all of it. And then she asked me the question, and she asked it the way a good supervisor asks a thing you are not going to enjoy.