Which stopped me, because it was not what I had expected and because it was said without any heat at all.

“Did you pay Jolene to go?” I asked.

“Jolene made her own arrangements.”

“Is it your money in it?”

And Agnes Thorne adjusted her pearls with one finger and said: “No.”

That was true.

I want to put that down, because it is one of perhaps three entirely true sentences my mother has said to me since 1994, and she said it on a driveway in November 2006 and I did not believe her and she did not care whether I believed her.

It was not her money.