I said: “Because I didn’t think it changed anything.”

And Odile Sandoval said: “It changes everything and you know it does, and you’ve known it for twelve years, and that’s why you didn’t say it.”

Then she got out of the truck.

She walked about thirty feet across a motel parking lot and stood with her back to me next to a planter with a dead thing in it, and she stayed there for about four minutes, and I sat in the cab and did not go after her, because there was nothing on earth I could have said.

When she came back she got in and shut the door and she was not crying, and she said, in a completely level voice, the four things that I have not been able to stop hearing.