He had looked at the empty place his father left and decided, with the fierce black-and-white logic of a child, that the place was now his to fill, that the protecting and the providing and the carrying that had been his father’s were now his, and that a good son, a good man, steps into that gap and does not complain.

It was, in its way, the most loving misunderstanding a child ever had.

He had taken the truest thing about his father, that Mark had loved us and provided for us and would have done anything to keep us safe, and he had concluded that love meant becoming that, at ten, at thirteen, in a father’s absence.

He was wrong.

He was heartbreakingly, beautifully wrong.