“Why didn’t Loretta speak up back then?” I asked.

“Sometimes people are frightened,” Opal said.

“It doesn’t excuse what they fail to do.

But it explains why courage can arrive late.”

I wondered whether courage that arrived four years late could still matter.

PART 9

The next breakthrough came from someone I had almost forgotten.

Her name was Denise Alvarez, and she’d been Buckeye’s warehouse supervisor.