And the sharpest justice of it, sharper than any court could hand down, is this: he got exactly the opposite.

He made himself so central that his absence was the thing that finally let the rest of us bloom.

Everything else in our lives, meanwhile, changed in the other direction altogether.

The Harringtons opened their arms to my children and to me with a warmth that undid, week by week, the story I had believed about them for over a decade.

They apologized, endlessly, for years they had lost and had not known they were losing.