He had held onto it because, in the arithmetic he carried in his head at all times, that backpack was not money.

It was four more weeks of the house standing.

It was the difference, in his mind, between his mother keeping her home and losing it.

And so when older boys demanded it, my son had made a calculation no thirteen-year-old should ever have to make, weighing his own safety against what he believed was his family’s survival, and he had chosen the survival, because that was the choice he had been making, in one form or another, every single day for six months.

I understood, hearing it, that the danger at the footbridge was not some separate misfortune that had befallen him.