I need to put down the guitar properly, because if you do not understand the guitar you will not understand anything that happened afterwards, and you will read what Julian did as a nice gesture by a nice boy, and it was not that.

It was a Stratocaster.

Not a top-of-the-line one — I want to be accurate about this because the number got inflated every time the story was retold and by the spring it had become a three-thousand-dollar instrument.

It was a Mexican-built Standard that his father and I bought from a shop two towns over in the January of 2021, and we had put the shop’s own custom pickups in it that summer as a birthday thing, which is where the word custom came from, and the whole of it had cost us twelve hundred and forty dollars across two instalments and I remember the second instalment because it came out of the month we did not get the dishwasher fixed.

Julian had asked for it for fourteen months.

Not nagged.

Asked, once, carefully, about every six weeks, which is a different thing and which I noticed at the time.

And once it was in the house he did not put it down.

He practised from about half past four until dinner, every weekday, and then again after.

He had a wire music stand and a book of exercises and he worked through them like a person doing sums.

He was not a prodigy.

I am his mother and I will say it plainly: he was a diligent, methodical, moderately talented kid who got better in a straight line because he did the boring parts, and his teacher at the time — a woman named Ruthann who taught out of her sun porch for twenty-five dollars a half hour — told me in the May of 2023 that in eleven years of teaching she had never had a student do the metronome work without being chased.

So that is the thing that was not on the stand.

“You what,” I said.