He had, I would learn, been at a formal veterans’ dinner when my photograph reached him, and he had stood up and walked out and driven straight to us, without stopping to take off a single one of his medals.

He looked, standing in our doorway in the gray morning light, like a verdict.

“Dad?” Marcus said, and his voice cracked on the single syllable.

“What — what are you doing here?”

“I came,” Arthur said, “for my grandsons.”

Marcus turned his head and fixed me with a look of pure venom.