I want to describe the specific character of that spring, because it is different from the thing that happened to me at twenty-nine and it took me most of a year to stop confusing them.

Nobody was doing anything to me. That was the whole of it.

Logan had made choices. Brenda had made choices. Paige had picked up a telephone. Every injury I had suffered in that house had been chosen by a person, and I had spent five years and a great deal of money establishing exactly which person had chosen what, and there had been a verdict.

This had no author at all. A tool returned a match. An analyst wrote an accurate memo. A committee made a rational decision. There was no one to sue, no one to confront, no one to be angry at, and no forensic audit of who paid the doctor, because nobody had paid anybody.

Hannah found me in the office at nine at night in May with the Meridian file still open on my screen.

“You’ve read that eleven times.”