She held up the folder.

And the last thing she said, which she had written out and which she read exactly as written, was:

“I am not angry.

I have a folder because I am a person who keeps things.

Most mothers are not.

“You should not need a mother to be the kind of person who keeps things.”

Maya did not say anything on the way home.

She is sixteen and she had sat through two hours of a public meeting including a long item about bus routes, and she had her school bag on her lap in the back, and she looked out of the window from Fairlane Road to our street without a word, which is not like her.