## The Limits of the Story
I want to say something about what this story is and isn’t, and where my authority to tell it ends.
What I know is my side. I know what I found, what I verified, what I did, what was said to me, what I said. I know the lender’s findings, which are documented. I know the conversations I had with my mother and with Luke and with Tessa, which I remember as accurately as anyone remembers conversations they care about — which is to say, probably mostly accurately, with the inevitable distortions of memory and emotion and the passage of time.
What I don’t know is my mother’s side. I mean that not as a polite caveat but as a genuine acknowledgment: I do not know the full shape of what she was dealing with when she did this. I do not know the specific financial crisis that prompted it, the exact amount she owed, the specific creditors she was managing, the timeline of her own fear and her own decision-making. She has told me pieces of it, and I have understood those pieces as honestly as I can, but I am not inside her experience and I cannot be.
I also do not know what she has told herself about what she did. Whether she has arrived at something like genuine reckoning, or whether she has constructed a version of events that she can live with more comfortably, I cannot say. The third call — the one where she said ‘it wasn’t mine’ — suggested movement. But one call is one call.