And Odile was — and I have thought about how to say this — Odile was present.

She was not grim and she was not brittle and she was not performing.

She was a woman getting married, on the day, with her sisters, and she laughed at things and she cried once at about one o’clock over something Ximena said, and she ate a sandwich, and at no point in eight hours did she look like a person carrying what she was carrying.

I asked her once, at about one-thirty, in a corridor, on my own, the only question I was going to be allowed.