Ferraro said: “And if she said it tomorrow?”

And I thought about that for a long time and then I said that I did not know, and she said that was the first honest answer I had given her about Patricia in nine months.

I have since worked it out and the answer is no.

Not because it would not matter.

It would matter enormously and it would matter most to the person it is owed to, who is not me.

It is that she has had two years and twenty-six sessions and a courtroom and an hour in a coffee shop, and in all of that she has said sorry perhaps thirty times and has not once put those two facts in the same sentence, and a thing that has not been said in two years with every opportunity is not a thing that is waiting to be said.