He began to explain — to a five-year-old, in a hospital bed, with a repaired leg — that everything on the bus had happened very fast, that Sienna was younger, that she had been calling for help, that he had simply acted on instinct, that Leo was older and braver and surely understood.

“You thought she mattered more,” Leo said.

It was not a question.

He said it the way he had said the other thing, plainly, a fact reported.

“My leg hurts.

I want to sleep now.” And he closed his eyes, and turned his face to the wall, and dismissed his father with a dignity that no child should ever have had to learn.