“The boy thinks our divorce happened because he couldn’t keep our secret, Mom,” he said.

And Charlotte, true to the very last to the only note she knew, defended herself: “I was only trying to keep our family together!” And Solomon — and this was the first crack, the first sign that something in him might not be entirely lost — shouted back at her: “Well, you didn’t keep it together!

And neither did I!” It was, he admitted to me much later, the first time in his adult life that he had put the word I in front of a failure, instead of my name.

Two days after that, he requested an urgent meeting with me and my attorney.