She started leaving for her shift forty minutes early so that she was not in the house in the afternoon.

She told one person — a girl called Yesenia from the clinic — about half of it, in a parking lot, once.

And she did not tell me, and she did not call the police, and she did not write anything down after the twenty-ninth of August, because she was twenty years old and nobody had ever told her that any of that was a thing a person does.

Part Thirty-Eight: Four Months