“I know.

I could hear it in how you told it.” She looked at me for a second.

“For what it’s worth.

Seven years ago, in that kitchen, you’d have explained.

You’d have explained for about forty minutes and you’d have been correct the entire time.”

And she went inside.

He brought it up again about five weeks later, calmly, in a completely different tone, and asked one specific question, which was whether my mother had ever met him.

I said no, once, when he was very small, but that he would not remember it and I had not been there.