Shane stared at his own signature.
“Forgery!” Marlene lunged for it.
“Did you drug my boy into signing that?”
I held it out of her reach.
“You still believe the whole world is conspiring against your perfect son.
He’s thirty-four, Marlene.
He’s not a victim.
He’s responsible for his signatures and his debts and his silence.” Shane looked at the floor and said, in a rasp, that the debt was real, that he acknowledged it.
His mother struck his shoulder and told him he was insane, that this was his condo, that he should let me rot without a penny — who needed me, anyway?
And I smiled — a real one, finally, with no bitterness left in it.