My mother barely tolerated Gabriel’s presence, and made a small performance of it, sharp little remarks about dirt tracked across her floors, about boys who did not know when to go home.

My father barely looked up from his evening newspaper when Gabriel walked through the living room, offering him the same distant, dismissive half-nod he gave to anything he considered beneath his sustained attention.

I noticed it, even then, the coolness of my parents, but I read it as ordinary parental stiffness, the reserve of people who valued their privacy.

I did not yet understand that the coldness I saw them aim at Gabriel was a smaller, milder version of a coldness they aimed, in secret, at my sister, and that the distance in my father’s eyes was not reserve at all but something closer to calculation.

That understanding was years away.