Daniel waited.

“I want to give you the true answer and it’s going to make you hate me, and I’ve decided I’d rather that than the other thing.” She held the cup with both hands.

“I looked at the thread. The photo was at the top and Patricia’s text was underneath it, and I thought — very clearly, I remember it, I was standing by a pillar near the gift shop — the text doesn’t work without the picture.

“Because it doesn’t. On its own it’s an old woman being cold in a group chat. It’s nothing. People are cold in group chats. It only lands if you can see what she was looking at when she wrote it.

“So I sent the picture. On purpose. Because it was the thing that made it land.”

“She was a child.”