What’s the reason?”

And I sat there for a while.

And then I said: “Because I didn’t want it to be the thing that was true about me for the rest of my life.”

Which is her sentence.

She said it to me in a car outside a state attorney’s office in the April, and I had been carrying it around for nineteen months without ever once noticing that it was also an answer to a question about a courtyard.

She did not say anything for a bit.