She talked for two hours.
Not continuously. There were pauses, the kind that came when a person reached the edge of one piece of something and needed a moment before picking up the next, and there were the smaller pauses of someone who had not spoken about certain things in a long time and found that the words for them had to be retrieved from a depth that required effort.
I did not fill any of the pauses.
I sat at the table with my coffee and listened with the specific quality of attention that I had been developing without naming for the past month, the ability to receive information without immediately processing it into strategy or response, to simply let it arrive and settle and find its own shape before I decided what it meant.
Elena Vasquez had been twenty-six when she died.
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