His father left when Eli was five. Trent said a lot of things on his way out the door but the one that stuck was that he couldn’t do a life where every single trip to the grocery store was a gamble.
I’d spent four years proving him wrong by myself. Forty-one thousand people watched me lose in eleven seconds.
I called the number on the card at 9:40 that morning. I don’t entirely know why. I think I just wanted one person in the world who’d been there to tell me I hadn’t imagined the part where it was also something else.
Walt picked up on the second ring.
I got about six words out before I started crying again, and he didn’t say there there, and he didn’t say calm down, and he didn’t say anything at all for a good forty seconds.
