She let him. She did not go to him right away. She wanted to, badly, and she did not, because she understood that this was a moment he needed to have all the way through, by himself, without someone softening the edges of it. She sat on the bucket and watched his shoulders shake and held her own hands together in her lap so tightly that her knuckles hurt.
After a while he said, through his hands, "He said try to remember it."
"He knew you wouldn't."
"How did he know?"
"Because you'd have said so," she said. "On the bleachers. If you remembered me telling you, the first thing out of your mouth would've been, she told me it was just questions, so why were you two in a car at eleven at night. You'd have been mad about something specific. Instead you were mad about all of it. Like it was new." She took a breath. "And because he grew up watching his brother forget things. He knows what it looks like when somebody's arguing with a memory they don't have."
Gerrit lowered his hands. His face was wet and red and he did not try to hide it. "So he was right," he said. "I'm making a mistake."
"You made a couple," she said. "Pushing him was one. Hiding this for three weeks is the big one." Then, because she had promised herself on the drive over that she would say all of it, not just the parts that were easy: "And I made one too. I should have gone to Ms. Bettany myself a week ago. I let you talk me out of it, because you were scared, and I love you, and I didn't want to be the one. I should have been the one. I'm not going to make that mistake again."