And there, near the middle of the stack, was a cashier’s check.

Sixty thousand dollars.

Signed at the bottom in my mother’s elegant, unmistakable hand.

“Your mother offered me this check to disappear,” Rosalind said, and her voice had dropped into a flat, icy register, the voice of a woman recounting something she had gone over ten thousand times alone in the dark.

“I refused it.

I told her I would not take money to keep your children from you.