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SERENA:

That is an unusually generous amount of editorial control.

BARYN:

Don’t get used to it.

[quiet laugh]

BARYN:

You could have let someone else do this.

[pause]

BARYN:

Why didn’t you?

SERENA:

There is a set of human remains that deserves identification. There is a town full of people who cared about her, and they deserve answers. There is an investigation that deserves to be conducted according to evidence rather than assumption, and I am consulting on that investigation because I am qualified to do so.

Those are all true statements.

They are also the statements I am permitted to make into your microphone without creating significant problems for myself.

[quiet laugh]

But you asked why not let someone else do it.

Casey was the first person who ever made me feel like I wasn’t difficult to know.

She didn’t understand everything about me. She wasn’t some magical teenage savant with a working knowledge of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Half the time, I don’t think she understood me at all.

She just didn’t require understanding me as a prerequisite for loving me.

She was infuriating.

She was loyal to people who did not always deserve it. She believed almost everyone had a good reason for being terrible, which is a philosophy I found empirically unsupported even at sixteen.

She routinely drank directly from my water bottle despite knowing I found this unacceptable.

She once convinced me to let her pierce my ear with a sewing needle.

[pause]

That nearly ended the friendship.

BARYN:

Understandable.

SERENA:

Thank you.

[pause]