It was a verdict, delivered with love, on the difference between the two men who had sat in that chair beside her, the one who was owed the role and the one who had grown into it.

She had lived eighty-four years.

She had seen, I am certain, a great deal of the world’s transactions, its arrangements, its polite and profitable substitutes for love.

And at the end of all of it, with the clearest part of her failing mind, she had reached past her own blood to name what had actually cared for her, and to reward it, and to call it by the truest word she had.

Son.