And I went and found the twenty-four-year-old assistant, whose name is Bryony, and who was completely destroyed about it and had been crying in a corridor, and I sat down with her for twenty minutes and told her that she had done nothing wrong, twice, until she believed it.

Because I have spent four years being extremely careful about who I let carry things in this story, and a young woman doing a hard job for very little money on a Tuesday does not get to carry any of it.

She is seven now.

She says no to adults.

She said it to a dentist last year, clearly, in a sentence, at six years old — “I don’t want that one, I want to do the other one first” — and I sat in that chair and had to look at the wall for a second.

Part Fifteen: The Apartment on Aldrich