And she said, “Were there really apples?”

And I said, “Green ones.”

And she said, “I knew it,” with enormous satisfaction, and asked for the radio.

I have told that story once at a dinner and a man laughed and said children are resilient.

They are not resilient.

They are absorbent.

Maya Tarrant-Vance does not have a scar from that room and I have spent three years making sure of it, and the cost of making sure of it was three conversations, two of which I got wrong first.

Part Nine: Four Pages