I want to be fair to myself for one paragraph before I am not.

She had been gone for three years and one month.

She had made no contact of any kind in that time — not a card, not a dollar, nothing.

Odile was fourteen and had stopped asking.

Bea was ten and was already what she was becoming.

Willa was three and had never met her.

And I was thirty-seven, working two-thirty to eleven, and had not had a full night’s sleep in four years, and I was holding the entire structure up with both hands.

And a woman in a parking lot was proposing to walk back into the middle of it and then leave again, which is what I believed, and which — I have to say this — is what an enormous number of people in that situation actually do.