“She said that?

Before any of this?”

“She said it in 2019.”

Carmen had believed for eight years that I had received a letter, a photograph and a phone message and had declined all three.

And when a man she was seeing asked her about the father of her child, what she said was he didn’t know.

I asked her about it, months later, and she was irritated by the question in the way she gets when something is obvious to her.

She said: “Of course I said that.

What was I going to do, tell a man I’d been seeing for four months that my son’s father abandoned him?

Then he looks at Beto differently forever.

“Wes, I’ve protected your reputation to that child’s face for eight years.