That grand stone house, with its gold-lettered sign and its dinners full of quiet cruelty and its walls hung with photographs that had no room in them for a grandmother — that had not been a nurturing place for a child, whatever it looked like from the road.

It had been a hothouse for the values that had ruined the adults inside it: status over substance, appearance over honesty, the pleasing of powerful strangers over the loving of your own blood.

A boy raised to manhood in that house would have learned those values the way children always learn values, not from lectures but from the very air, and he would have grown into another Steven, or another Stephanie, charming and hollow and destined to sell someone who loved him for a name on a sign.

I could not stand by and let that happen to him.