My cousin Dara.

Her hairdresser.

Said as fact, with a doctor attached to it that did not exist.

And in the February of 2014, a woman she had said that about stood on her porch, five months pregnant, holding a sonogram.

My mother said: “If I let her in and you found out, then within a week every person I had said it to was going to know that I had made it up.”

“That’s what you were weighing?

Against a grandchild?”

And she said, “It doesn’t feel like that at the time.

At the time it’s just a door, and a woman on the other side of it, and about four seconds.”

The second reason she had never said out loud to anybody in her life.