“I’m angry that you decided it for us.

There’s no order, so there’s no arrears, so there is nothing — legally, literally — that says she owed us anything.

And now I can’t ever make her admit it, because you closed the door in 2012 and I was thirteen.”

Part Seven: The Crate

She showed it to me on the Wednesday, three days before the wedding, in a storage unit on Florin Road in Sacramento that I did not know she was renting.

It was four feet by four feet by three and a half, built out of three-quarter-inch plywood with a piano hinge along the back and two lifting handles, and it was very well made, because her fiancé Manny is a finish carpenter and he had built it in March without being told what it was for.