“You can give her my lesson,” he told his father, in that flat little voice.

“She can have my toys too.

That’s okay.”

Later, when we were alone, when it was just the two of us in the small square of the house that was still ours, I sat on the floor beside his wheelchair and asked him, as gently as I could, why he had given away all the things he loved without a fight.

He thought about it for a moment, my serious boy, turning a small toy car over in his hands.

And then he said something that I have never been able to repeat without my throat closing.