The handwriting is a child’s — careful, a little cramped, the letters of a boy concentrating hard on getting the words right and getting them to me without being seen.

It is the bravest thing I have ever held.

What undoes me about it is not the fear in it but the trust: my son wrote those words and slid them across a table on the pure faith that his mother would read them and believe him, after months of small evidence that she might not.

He bet his life, and mine, on my believing him.

He was right to.