Hi Carol, these sentences are two cases of reported speech (as opposed to direct speech), which is used when you want to "report" someone's words. When we use reported speech, we (usually) jump back a tense, so for example if I tell you right now that I love dogs and you want to tell this to your friend in reported speech, you should say: Sara told me that she loved dogs. You see how I went back a tense here, from simple present to simple past. (This kind of change in tense might be because when you are reporting something, it is considered your (very) recent past even if it has just happened.) Now in your two sample sentences, the speaker is referring to two events that have happened sometime in the past. If the events have happened fairly recently, when you want to report them, you should go back a tense and change them from simple past to past perfect. They might also have happened in the remote past, in which case the tense of the direct and reported speech would be the same, past perfect. So either way you should use past perfect and not simple past. Here's a link to a complete table of tense changes for reported speech: http://www.ef.com/english-resources/english-grammar/tense-changes-when-using-reported-speech/