I say it to every family because I’ve learned that if I don’t, somebody in that family will invent a reason.

“He was told.

On the night.”

I got out to the parking structure and sat in my car on the third level and cried for about fifty minutes.

Not for June.

I had done that.

I did that for years.

For the twenty-eight-year-old woman on a sofa eleven days after surgery, being told in her own living room that she had killed her daughter, and for the nine years that woman then spent doing that arithmetic on herself every few weeks — while the one person in the world who had been told the truth by a doctor at four in the morning stood next to her and said nothing, for nine years, because it cost us nothing.