He had forged a version of his mother that was twenty-five years out of date, and there is something almost unbearably sad in that detail, underneath the crime of it, that I did not fully feel until later.

My son did not know how his own mother signed her name.

He had produced a forgery good enough to fool a casual eye, which meant he had studied some old document of mine, some letter or card from years ago, carefully enough to copy the shapes of my hand.

But he had reached for a version of me that was decades stale, because the current version, the mother he saw every week, the woman whose actual recent signature he could have glanced at on any number of papers, he had simply never looked at closely enough to know.

He knew me well enough to imitate me and not well enough to imitate me correctly.