“And that child watches me.

She watches every single thing I do in that house and she reports on it to you with her face.

And I have spent two years trying — trying, Chris — to be pleasant and patient and understanding, and I am about to sign up for forty more years of coming second to a memory and third to a nine-year-old, and I wanted one afternoon. One.

Where I was the only person in the photographs.”

She stopped.

Somewhere behind her the piece ended and there was that particular silence that happens before a processional.