“So we are going to get a piece of paper from a laboratory with a chain of custody on it, and it is going to sit in a drawer, and nobody is ever going to have to take my word for anything about my own child ever again.”

I said, “And if I say I don’t want it?”

And she said, “Then you’d be putting your comfort ahead of his again, and you’ve done enough of that.”

We used an accredited lab off Research Boulevard, the legal kind rather than the mail-order kind, which means photographs and driver’s licenses and a technician who does the collection and signs a form, because a test without that is worth nothing if anybody ever wants to argue.

Beto thought it was tremendous.

He was seven.

A woman put a long swab in his cheek and rubbed it for thirty seconds and he asked four questions about what happens next and she answered all of them properly, and he told her he was going to be a scientist, which he has since revised to a firefighter and then to something involving trains.

He had been told, at that point, that I was an old friend of his mother’s called Wes.

That was it.

The lab visit was, to him, a slightly strange errand.