Short and boring and in public, for as long as Carmen said, which turned out to be about a year.

And one absolute: Loretta was never to say one word to Beto about the eight years, in any direction — not an explanation, not an apology, not a hint.

Carmen’s position on this was that a seventy-one-year-old woman’s need to be understood was not going to be met by a second-grader, and she was right.

My mother agreed to all of it and then tried to get round it twice, and I want both attempts on the record because they are the truest things she did that year.

The first was in the August.

She had a rental property in Pflugerville that my father had bought in 1996, and she came to Carmen’s apartment with a folder and offered to put it in Beto’s name.

Carmen did not touch the folder.

She said: “Loretta.

Eight years ago you decided I couldn’t give this family a child, and you used that to work out what I was worth, and you told people.

“Now you’d like to use the child I did have to settle it up.