A man who guards the door while another does the wrong has arranged his whole soul so that he never has to know.

My son smiled at me in that mirror not because he was brave enough to defy me, but because he had convinced himself he wasn’t really doing anything at all.

That was the moment I understood I was not dealing with a boy who had made a bad choice.

I was dealing with a man who had built a machine for never having to feel like he’d made one.

Chapter 2 — Twenty-Nine Years