I promise you I wasn’t sure.” And then he told me what he had noticed, that afternoon over the soup.

Two things.

Her age, which was about right.

And a long, jagged burn scar across her left wrist — the wrist, he said, that I had told him about years ago, one quiet night when I was talking about my mother: how she had burned that exact wrist cooking, when I was small.

“I thought it was almost certainly just a terrible coincidence,” he said.

“One old woman’s scar.