There are exceptions — for continuing offences, for a defendant’s absence from the state, for certain schemes to defraud.

We looked at all of them.

Two of them were arguable and neither of them was good, and the honest assessment, which I eventually paid for a third time, was that no district attorney’s office in the state was going to take a six-year-old forgery against a seventy-four-year-old woman with no prior history on a tolling theory.

I asked what would have happened if I had found out four months earlier.

And the former prosecutor said: “You’d have had a case.