He had been a terrible father, for forty-five years.

I will not pretend otherwise, and I will not pretend the two good years erase the forty-five bad ones.

They do not.

A childhood of poverty and abandonment is not undone by tea and chess at the end of a life.

What was taken from me, the mother, the father, the ordinary safe childhood, the decades of struggle that a different choice would have spared me, none of it can be given back.

Harrison knew that.