I flew to Charlotte and met her in a diner because she would not come to an office.

She is fifty-nine now and works in warehouse scheduling for a beverage distributor and has a good, dry, exhausted manner, and she did not want an apology and said so in the first two minutes.

“I want to know if it was considered,” she said. “That’s it. That’s the whole reason I wrote. Not whether you were right. Whether it was thought about.”

I could have said several things. I had prepared several things.

“No,” I said.

Odalys put her coffee down.