I had spent a year watching two adults treat a child as an instrument — Flynn, who left his son in the first hour of his life to go and protect a balance sheet; Selina, who had let her pregnancy be laundered through fake invoices without, so far as I ever saw, a single thought for what it would mean for the boy when it all came apart.

They had both, in their different ways, decided that the child was a means to something.

And I decided, deliberately, that I would not be a third adult who did that.

Punishing the baby for his parents would have been the easiest thing in the world, and it would have felt, for about a day, like justice.

But it would have made me one more person in that child’s life who looked at him and saw a way to hurt someone else.

I would not be that.