I pushed them aside and sat down. She wrapped both hands around the coffee mug as if she were cold.

“He died last month,” she said.

I waited. I’d already mourned my son twenty-five years ago. You can’t grieve someone twice.

“Cancer,” she said. “Pancreatic. He was sick for almost a year.”

“Before he died,” Sophia continued, not meeting my eyes, “he told me things.”

My voice came out harder than I meant it to. “What kind of things?”

“About you. About what happened. Why he left.”

“What happened is he emptied our safe and disappeared.”