He had put a date on it.

He had told a twenty-four-year-old woman a specific month.

“And you believed that,” I said.

She looked up at me, and her face was so open and so young that for a second I was back in a kitchen with a fifteen-year-old who wouldn’t say she was cold.

“Yes,” she said.

And I believed her.

That’s the thing.

I believed her completely, and it changed nothing at all.