And Simone Gaddis stood up and walked eleven feet and cancelled the call.

Nine seconds of silence on that recording is the sound of my ex-wife deciding.

Nita told me, months later, that when Simone took the phone, she said one thing to her first, with her hand over the microphone.

She said: “Baby, let me.”

Which is what an adult says to a child who is handling something too big for her, and which is the correct and kind thing to say in almost every situation a sixteen-year-old will ever be in, and which on that afternoon was the worst sentence anybody said out loud.

Part Nine: The Paperwork