“And I was not able to say that sentence to another human being.

Not once.

Not in six years.

“I could carry it.

I could not say it.”

Part Seventeen: Why She Was on the Floor

She was going to Rochester.

She had been offered, in the July, a position as rooms division manager at a full-service property near the airport there — a real promotion, the first one she had been given rather than taken, at fifty-eight thousand dollars a year with medical from day one.