I told Dr. Sandoval the following week that I thought I had been waiting for her to say something.

“For what, specifically?”

And I heard myself say: “It was never discipline.”

I had said that sentence to Brenda in a parking lot with police officers present, six years ago, and I had said it well and clearly and I have quoted it since.

And I had believed, in some room in myself I had never gone into, that one day she would agree.

She paid nine thousand dollars. She was legally square with me for four years. She died in Ocala and she never agreed, and there is nobody left to agree, and it turns out that the sentence was never going to be finished by her.