That she managed me the way she manages everybody, and that I was a woman of thirty-eight still doing what she was told.

“That’s true and it isn’t the answer.

“The answer is that I didn’t want the afternoon.

I knew exactly what I’d found out in August and I knew what it required and I did not want to have that conversation with you, because it would have been the end of nine years of everything, and I put my own child in a car for seven more weeks so that I didn’t have to have a bad conversation.

“I’m not asking you to forgive that.