My husband had twins with my best friend and told me he finally had the family I could never give him. I signed the divorce papers without arguing — and then his mother answered my message with one sentence that told me the divorce wasn’t the end of anything.

Today: I sign, and eleven minutes later I get a photograph of two newborns.

Tonight: I send one sentence about a visit, and a seventy-one-year-old woman who has never once responded to a text message of mine within an hour answers in under sixty seconds with the word confirmed.

She had not been fishing. She had been checking.

You do not spend an hour and fifty minutes on the phone with a daughter-in-law you dislike unless you are trying to find out how much she knows.

And you do not write you have no idea what you just confirmed unless the thing being confirmed was already yours.

I called Roz Ambrogio at seven the next morning and read her the message, and she was quiet for a moment and then said, “Thea. Don’t answer her. Don’t ask her anything. Whatever that is, let it arrive on its own.”

I asked her why.