Patricia had brought a letter, which Daniela took and has not read and which is in a drawer in her room.

She said she will read it when she is thirty and she means it.

Patricia cried for about a third of the hour.

Patricia asked, twice, whether they could start again.

And Patricia told her about the treatment programme, at some length, and about the food bank, and about the job she has now at a hardware chain on Bell Road doing inventory at seventeen dollars an hour, and about the apartment in Glendale with her brother’s old furniture in it.

And Daniela said she listened to all of it and that she did not mind listening to it.