Evelyn Lawson called me on a Tuesday evening, six days after we signed.

I looked at the screen for four rings before I answered, because in eleven years my mother-in-law had called my phone directly perhaps nine times, always about a date, never for longer than two minutes.

She kept me on the phone for an hour and fifty minutes.

She did not apologize.

I want to say that up front, because it came later and it took two years, and the woman on the phone that night was not apologizing for anything.

She was a seventy-two-year-old matriarch conducting an inquiry, and I was a source.