My mother handed me a piece of paper that said the woman I had married was the reason we could not have children, and I read it, and I accepted it, and some cowardly relieved part of me was almost grateful for it, because it settled the question and it settled it in a direction that asked nothing further of me.

I never called the clinic.

I never asked Samantha to come with me and hear it together.

I never treated the most devastating claim of our marriage as a thing worth verifying.

I just took the paper my mother wanted me to take, the way I had taken everything my mother wanted me to take my whole life, and I let it do its work.

The forgery was hers.