And my sister looked completely blank and said: “What eleven words?”

I said them to her. If she gets too upset, you decide.

You’ve always been the decider.

And Perla said: “I don’t remember saying that.”

I have thought about that more than almost anything.

I built sixteen weeks on a sentence, and I preserved it perfectly, verbatim, the way I preserve everything, and I was right about every syllable of it.

And the woman who said it does not remember saying it, and I believe her, because I have spent sixteen years watching people not remember what they said four minutes ago.