I didn’t sit. My legs wouldn’t take the instruction. She lowered herself onto the edge of the bed like twenty years of silence had all arrived at once.

“Twenty years ago, I had a son.”

Confusion first. Then anger. Then a fear that closed around my chest and made it hard to breathe.

“What does that have to do with me?”

“Everything.” She looked directly at me. No hesitation.

She told me that at forty she’d been married to a powerful agricultural businessman named Richard Caldwell — a man who was respected in public and ruthless behind closed doors, who controlled land and contracts and people with the same ease.