Because it is not the same as what she did. A shelter manager in a meeting four years ago made a decision about a stranger with a conviction and I am the eleven-year-old who found the note.

But I keep coming back to the fact that somebody in this county thought that question through properly, in three meetings, about my grandmother — and nobody in my family thought it through at all about the seven-year-old.

We just decided she was spoiled. In writing. Where she could find it.

Chapter 17 — The House

Colin and I had it out in June, four years and four months late, over a dishwasher.

It started with nothing — he said something mild about my mother’s china, which is in a box in our garage, and I heard myself say, “Why were we living there?”

He stopped with a plate in his hand.