You have given them a thing to be caught with.

We changed the intake protocol in October. Hannah wrote most of it; she was better placed than I was, having spent fourteen months not calling my father.

Nothing physical at first contact. Nothing that goes home in a coat or a bag. No phones, no printouts, no cards, no numbers written down. We say the sentence, and we say it plainly, and we say what we can do, and we give an appointment and a way to memorize one phone number, and we let the person come back.

They come back or they don’t. It is not our decision and it never was, and it took me five years and Clara Ovalle’s eyebrow to learn that.

Chapter 16 — Every Day

My father was sixty-two that year and had spent his retirement building a workshop he does not use for anything and helping every neighbour in Pacific Pines with every conceivable task.

We walk the boardwalk on Thursdays. Have done since the year of the trial.