I became a private investigator because of my face. It’s an ordinary-looking face, but if I ask “How are you?” sometimes people start crying. “I’m getting a divorce,” they say. “He ended our marriage by text.” Or “I was just diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease.” Or a man grips a packet of peas in the frozen food aisle and asks, “How do you cook these? My wife died last month.”

Or an immaculately dressed woman suddenly tells me, “I hate my job so much I want to kill myself. I’ve been saving up Ambiens.”

Then we sit on a concrete curb, or stand in line at a train station, or clutch clear plastic cups at a party as the near-stranger in front of me dabs away mascara with a cocktail napkin and dumps out her mind like it’s her purse, like I’m the one who can sift through the dust and used tissues to find what she’s looking for.

Demographics don’t seem to matter. Young, old, women, men, nonbinary, gay, straight, rich, poor, East, West—everyone tells me things. A woman with twenty-six grandchildren and fifteen great-grandchildren whispered to me at her 101st birthday party that she wished she never had kids, that she had wasted her life on all these people. After I volunteered at an elementary school, a six-year-old followed me all the way to the bathroom to tell me in Spanish that her daddy’s not going to come home anymore.

Even as a kid, I was a storage locker for people’s secrets. Grown-ups confessed their affairs, lost fetuses, traumas. When I was seven, my maternal grandmother told me her husband chased her with a knife. One of my elementary school teachers told me he was leaving his wife because she hoarded pizza boxes and dead bugs. When I was fourteen, my mother’s friend yanked me aside and said, “I just want to say your mother is a bitch. You know she’s a bitch, right?” When I was seventeen, X, my abuser, blurted that he had denied a promotion to a friend at work because he was Black. This wasn’t intimacy; we hated each other.