He will read a sentence his mother wrote nine months before he was born, when she was frightened and alone and thirty-four, in which she asks a man to come and tell her himself, whatever the answer is.

And he will read what a woman wrote on the back of it in blue ballpoint in four seconds.

I do not know what he will do with that.

I have thought about it more than is useful.

He may be angry with me for a year.

He may be angry with his grandmother, who he has never met and who may not be alive.

He may put the box down and go and do something else, because he will be eighteen.