“I’m seventy-two years old and I’m in a one-bedroom above a laundry.”

“I know that.”

“He told me it was a bridge.

He said six weeks.” Her voice went.

“I signed it in eleven minutes.

I didn’t read one page of it.

I didn’t ask him a single question, because he was my son and you don’t—”

And then she stopped, and there was a silence on that line that went on for a long time, because both of us had arrived at the same place at the same moment.