I am not sure, even now, why I went — or rather I am sure, and the reason embarrasses me a little, because the reason was simply that I am his mother and could not help it.

He looked older in the visiting room, and smaller, and for a moment across that scarred table I saw the boy again, the one who used to climb into my lap during thunderstorms.

We did not say much.

He did not apologize, not really; he said he was sorry it had “gone this way,” which is the apology of a man still sorry mostly for himself.

But near the end he asked me a question I have not stopped turning over.

He asked why I had taught him, all those years ago, how to spot a forged signature — as though I had somehow armed him for his own destruction, handed him the very knowledge he had used against me.