He had a way of explaining a thing that closed the subject — a calm, faintly disappointed tone, as if any further question would be a small insult to his competence.

When he sat us down and told us the settlement was gone, he used exactly that tone, and it worked exactly as it always did.

Mama cried.

I nodded.

Nobody asked to see a single document.

I remembered Mama crying when Delroy explained the money was gone.

All these years I’d assumed she cried because she felt helpless, because she was scared for me.

Sitting in her kitchen with that letter in my hands, another possibility opened up in front of me, and it was worse.