He needed somebody outside himself to say it out loud, because the thing his mother had put her thumb on was not a suspicion about me.

It was a conviction about him, thirty-eight years old, which no amount of paperwork had ever touched.

And I was the one person who could not be allowed to say it, because I was the person whose reassurance he had been receiving for ten years and discounting for ten years.

Ten years of me saying it isn’t your fault, and him saying I know, and neither of us noticing that he did not.

I looked back down at the photograph on my blanket.