She had, I found out later, no independent memory of me at all, which is exactly as it should be — she had done perhaps six thousand deliveries since — but she read the file before I came in, which is not nothing, and which cost her twenty minutes of a Tuesday she was not paid for.

I sat down and put the box on her desk and said, “I need to ask you a question that’s nine years late.”

She read for a while.

She was slow about it, and she went back a page twice.

Then she took her glasses off.

“Ask me.”

“Did I cause it?”

Dr. Hayes said, “No.”