He went still.
"I told you I'd been talking to him. I told you his older brother had a bunch of concussions in high school and hid them, and now he's twenty-one and he can't work full time and some days he can't stand the sound of the dishwasher. I told you I'd been asking Imre questions because he knows what it looks like from the inside of a family, and I didn't know who else to ask. I told you I was going to keep meeting him." She kept her voice even. It took everything she had. "And I told you that if you didn't go to Ms. Bettany by Wednesday morning, tomorrow morning, I was going with you. And if you wouldn't come, I was going alone. You held my hand. You said okay. You said you were glad I had somebody to talk to." She swallowed. "Do you remember any of that?"
For a long time he did not say anything at all. The garage was very quiet. Out on Fairhollow Street a car went by slowly with its stereo thumping, and a dog barked twice two houses down and stopped.
"No," Gerrit said.
It came out small. She had never heard him sound small. In three years she had seen him lose, and she had seen him get yelled at by Coach Strickmann in front of the whole team, and she had seen him at his grandfather's funeral, standing up at the front of St. Brendan's in a suit that was too short in the sleeves, reading a poem with his voice breaking on every third word. She had never once heard him sound small.
"No," he said again. "I don't. Noor, I don't remember any of it."
And then he put his face in his hands.