“You didn’t finish the sentence,” she said. “But I’ve spent a long time thinking about how it ended.”

I couldn’t speak. I’m not sure my voice was working. I sat there with my hands in my lap and the cards fanned out in front of me like some kind of report card for the last twenty years of my life.

She stood up. She put the recorder back in the bag. She left the cards.

She got to the door and I finally found something like words. I said, “Cassie, I know it’s not enough, but I am so sorry.”

She stopped with her hand on the door.

She turned back and looked at me one more time. And she said something I have not stopped thinking about since she walked out.

“I know you are,” she said. “But I’m not who you need to apologize to.”

She meant herself. The eleven-year-old at the counter with the homework. The one who heard me and never said a word and just waited, quietly, for twenty-two birthdays, to see if I’d ever actually show up.

I sat at that table for a long time after she left.

The cards were still there. Twenty-two of them, all opened now, all with just my name.

I still haven’t called her. I don’t know what I would say that she doesn’t already know. And I keep thinking about that recording, about my own voice saying she was too much, and how easy it was to say it, and how it never occurred to me even once that she might hear.