That one I will keep.

And because I liked him.

That is the real one and it is the one I could not have said out loud at the time and could not have got to without three years.

I liked Walter Strand.

Forty-one hours of a man across two winters and I liked him more than I liked most of the people I worked with, and when he said he did not want to die belonging to nobody, some part of me that I was not consulting heard a completely different sentence.

I was thirty-two.