He had been doing the single most selfless thing I have ever witnessed a human being do, and I stood there and imagined him a criminal.

But I have also, with time, forgiven myself for it, because I understand now that my mind reached for those dark stories precisely because it could not conceive of the true one.

The truth, that a thirteen-year-old was secretly working himself to exhaustion to pay a debt he had discovered and hidden in order to save his mother’s house, is not a story a mind reaches for, because it is almost too much to believe.

My imagination failed not because it was cruel but because it was too small.