Here is what I understood, and it was not the obvious thing.

The obvious thing is that my mother had taken it, and that was enormous and it is what everybody who hears this story goes to.

What I understood at that table was that the letter was, in its entirety, a letter to a man who might say no.

Carmen had sat down in February 2014 and written four full paragraphs establishing that it was all right if I did not want my son.

She had planned for it.

She had prepared a version of her own life in which the father of her child came to her door and said I’d rather not, and she had decided, in advance, to accept that with dignity and not to poison the boy with it.

That is what six years of marriage to me had taught her to expect.

Not because I had ever said anything like that.

Because for two years she had watched me take the easy road at every single table in my mother’s house, and she had extrapolated, correctly, the kind of man who does that.

My mother stole that letter.