I never knew about an appointment.”

“I believed that once,” she answered.

“Then the calls stopped going through and the envelopes came back.

Willa was coming, and I couldn’t spend my pregnancy pleading for a response from a man who appeared to have made his choice.”

Her words weren’t an invitation to argue.

They were an account of what had happened to her.

I wrote down the dates she remembered, told her I was sorry, and asked whether she still had the letter.

“Yes.