“Evelyn, I swear to you, I don’t remember standing there with him.

I don’t remember this photograph being taken.

I don’t” He stopped, pressing his fingers to his forehead as though trying to force a door open in his own mind.

I did not doubt him, exactly.

But I could see that the not-remembering frightened him more than a memory would have, because a blank space where a memory should be is its own kind of evidence, evidence that something had happened that he had needed, very badly, to forget.

I had seen this before, in a smaller way, in the years of caring for my own life’s difficulties, the way the human mind will wall off a memory that is too dangerous to hold, will build over it and pave the road smooth so that you can go on functioning.