for either of us to ask the obvious question first.
Part Two: What Judith Finally Explained
She sat down heavily on the tree’s exposed roots, staring at the photograph a long moment before finally speaking. She explained, slowly, the considerable pressure she’d faced at nineteen — pressure from her own parents, from the particular expectations of that entire era, from circumstances that had genuinely felt, to a frightened teenage girl, impossible to fight against alone.
She described the specific conditions placed on her at the time, and the decision she’d ultimately
