Joelle's walk and the U.H.I.D. card — "For a while, after the acid…"
For a while, after the acid, after first Orin left and then Jim came and made her sit through that filmed apology-scene and then vanished and then came back but only to—only four years seven months six days past—to leave, for a while, after taking the veil, for a while she liked to get really high and clean.
Context
Grief's arithmetic embedded mid-sentence: the loss dated to the day — the compulsive precision of a memory that has never stopped counting. (The count is the known one-year-short inconsistency — Carlisle corrects to five-plus years — as printed per the ruling.) Around the date, the sequence of abandonments runs as a single unpunctuated remembering, the syntax stuttering on "for a while" three times.