He walked out of a maternity ward in the tenth.

Those are the same man, and any version of this story that only has one of them in it is a lie, and the versions people wanted from me afterwards all only had one of them in it.

My mother’s version had only the second one.

Kevin’s mother’s version, naturally, had only the first, and she said it to me on a doorstep eleven months later: that boy has given you ten years of his life.

And the truth, which satisfies nobody and which is the only thing I have, is that what Kevin was good at was staying in a room with something that could not be fixed.