“Well.

Nobody told me.”

And I said, “Carmen told you.

Twice.

In this kitchen.”

She did not have anything for that.

What she has said since, eleven months later, unprompted, in a car, is: “I’ve thought about what you put on my table.

I think what I actually wanted, in all that time, was for it not to be my son.

And I got that by deciding it was her, and I never once checked, and I said it to people.”

That is the closest my mother has come and I have decided it is close enough to be going on with.