“I’m not finished, and you have to let me get to the end, because the end is the reason I came.”

I sat there with my hands in my lap.

“I left in the following August,” she said. “By myself. No phone, no plan, no shelter. I walked out of the house on a Sunday morning and got on a bus with forty dollars and went to my cousin’s in Fresno, and it was the stupidest, least-prepared escape in the world and it worked, and I have been out for three years.”

“What made you go?”

And Clara Ovalle said:

“You told me I wasn’t crazy.”