It took about fifty minutes and I did not raise my voice once, and I want to give the substance of it rather than the whole thing, because the whole thing is unbearable.

She denied writing it for about eleven minutes.

Then, when I pointed out that it was her handwriting, her pen, and her address, she said she “might have written something, years ago, when I was out of my mind with grief about your father.”

Then she said she had done it to protect me.

That is the third position and it is the one she has held ever since, and she arrived at it inside twenty minutes and has never moved off it.

“You were in a war zone,” she said.