And I answer every unknown number.

Every one. Telemarketers, robocalls, warranty scams, wrong numbers, a woman in Ohio who has called me four times looking for a man named Grady. I have never once let a call go to voicemail since April.

I know exactly what it is. Ruthanne and I have gone eleven rounds on it. It is not hope; I am not confused about who is dead. It is that on the fourteenth of October, 2019, at 4:41 in the afternoon, a phone buzzed in a bag on the floor of a fifth-grade classroom, and it rang four times, and I let it go, and I had a perfectly good reason.

*Truth is patient,* I wrote once. I believed it. I said it to a room of people at the courthouse and one of them quoted it in an article.

It isn’t. Truth isn’t patient. Truth isn’t anything — it’s a thing in a drawer, and it does not move, and it does not knock, and it will sit under a shoebox of hair elastics for as long as the room stands.

It waited seven years in a ceramic lighthouse ten feet from my couch, and it did nothing, because it can’t. It needed someone to carry it out. And the only person in that house who could was six years old, and then ten, and then twelve, and she carried it alone the entire time while every adult who loved her decided, one by one, in private, what she was strong enough to know.

We called that patience.

It was easier than looking at what we had left her holding.

End of Part Two.