We have to hold the whole person, the whole contradictory tangle of them, and decide what to do with all of it at once.

Harrison was a coward who ruined my childhood.

Harrison was a friend who redeemed my old age.

Both were true.

Both were him.

And the terrible tenderness I felt, reading his confession, was the feeling of my heart refusing to split him into a villain and a friend, insisting instead on holding him whole, in all his weakness and all his late, laboring love, which is, I have come to believe, the only honest way to love any human being, living or dead: not in the parts we can approve of, but entire, flaws and grace together, the whole broken magnificent contradiction of them.

Chapter 11 — Three Hollow Monsters