She believed it.

She had gotten hers through it.

A cousin of Luca’s asked me whether I had considered what the children would think in twenty years about a mother who “couldn’t forgive.”

Somebody — I still don’t know who — told somebody else that I had known for months and had been building a case, which is the version that got back to me in June and which took eleven months to die.

And underneath every single one of those conversations was the same proposition, phrased eleven different ways, which I eventually learned to hear as one sentence: