You were doing it so that a pair of hands would stop arriving without warning.

That is exactly right and I would like to know where you read it.”

I could not remember.

I still cannot.

Part Fourteen: My Parents

My mother is Yolanda Restrepo and she was sixty-six that October and she offered to take Esme that Saturday and was told no.

She told me on the nineteenth, standing at her own kitchen counter, in the middle of something else entirely, and she did not know what she was handing me.

She said: “I said I’d have her.