“Then you drive.”

“Wendy—”

“Jessi.” She stopped, with her coat half on.

“You listen to me.

If you go there alone, in ten years you will still be the woman who went there alone.

If I go with you, then there were two of us, and everybody in this family knows it, and nobody gets to tell you afterward what you saw.”

I have thought about that sentence more than almost anything else anybody said to me that year.

I called a cab, because neither of us should have been driving, and we waited on the porch for it in the cold without talking, and she held her purse against her chest with both arms the whole way there like a woman on a bus in a country she doesn’t know.