There’s paperwork.

It’s already drawn.”

Already drawn.

I believed that for eighteen years.

I told it to perhaps forty people as the proof of what she was — that there had been a package of documents sitting at a firm in Denver with my name typed on it before the child was a day old.

Nothing was drawn.

Not a page.

Hale & Vance were not instructed until the eleventh of September, which is thirteen weeks later, and the papers did not reach me until the twenty-first of November.