Mom nods on the pillow. “Over the past thirty-seven years. And Viola never spent a dime of it. She cashed the checks, all right, but she put the money in a secret account to save for her son. Tom was right when he talked about Viola’s dignity. She was too proud to ever use that money for herself. She saved it for Lincoln, praying the day would come when she could trust him with it, or trust Jelks not to steal it from him some way.”

“Dad never knew you were sending that?”

“Lord, no. I took it out of the money he gave me to run the house. You and Jenny and I had to do without some things, but that was a small price to pay to keep Viola and her baby in Chicago.”

The thought that for more than three decades my mother operated in this dual reality is hard to fathom. “Good God, Mom.”

She shrugs under the sheet. “We do what we have to do. Anyway . . . Viola was well aware that my money hadn’t paid the debt I owed her. Because that night, she called in her marker.”

“What do you mean?”

“She told me that she’d stayed away all those years, even though she was miserable a lot of the time, and now she needed my help.”

My heart flutters. “What did she want?”

Mom’s eyes harden. “She wanted me to do what your father couldn’t.”

“You didn’t inject her with adrenaline—”

“No. Morphine. There was a nearly full bottle there, just out of her reach. Tom had given her enough to sedate her, but he’d diluted it with saline.”

“On the stand he said Viola would have caught him if he tried that.”

Mom shakes her head. “He was just trying to protect me when he said that. He injected her in a deep vein, in the inner thigh. She couldn’t see down there. Her muscular control was very poor by then. That’s why she couldn’t inject herself.”

“I thought it was because she was a devout Catholic.”

“Well . . . that, too, I suppose. Are you ashamed of me? For doing that?”

“I’m just surprised. I don’t know why, though.”

“Penn, if you had been there . . .” With great effort, Mom lifts her left hand and touches my cheek. “Do you remember when Sarah was suffering like that?”

If I truly open myself to that period of my life, horror and pain flood in like a black tide. “I remember.”

“Viola’s physical pain wasn’t as bad as Sarah’s, but her emotional state was worse. Far worse. Sarah was taken from a happy life, a beautiful family. But Viola died believing she had failed her only child. That’s almost unendurable for a mother.”