Her actual objection was not that Evelyn was unsuitable.

It was that Evelyn was unmanaged.

A woman with no family in the city, no money, no professional standing, and a total indifference to the name, who challenged me across dinner tables in front of people, who could not be predicted and could not be leveraged and would not be handled.

And when the pregnancy arrived, my mother did the only thing she had ever known to work.

She offered money and she produced a document, because that is exactly what had worked in 1991, and because it had worked so completely that her own son reached forty-four years old without knowing he had a brother.