“If she has everything,” he said, quietly, not looking at me, “then maybe they won’t come into my room.”

That was it.

That was the whole of his strategy, worked out alone, by a five-year-old, from a wheelchair.

He was not being generous.

He was paying tribute.

He had understood, in the way children understand the weather of the adults around them, that he was in danger of being taken from piece by piece — and he had calculated that if he surrendered everything they might want, gave it up before they came for it, then perhaps, perhaps, they would leave him the last small thing: the safety of his own room, his own door, the one space that was still his.