“That’s what I said to her,” Pamela said, more quietly.

“Some version of that.

And I should not have said it to a child and I know that, and I’m sorry, and we can fix that.

But you asked.”

And I stood there and understood two things at once.

The first was that almost everything she had just said was true from where she was standing, and that a better man than me might have found a way to hear it eighteen months earlier, in a kitchen, before it had anywhere else to go.