Rowan sent me one himself, a picture of his mother blowing out her candles, with a note attached. See?

Everything’s fine when people stop overreacting.

I saved it.

By that point every cruel little message had stopped landing as a wound and started filing itself, automatically, as a record.

It is a strange gift, the profession I have; it lets you feel a betrayal and catalog it in the same motion.

One of the photographs actually made me laugh out loud in my hospital bed.

On Rowan’s wrist, in the resort picture, was a platinum watch — not the gift he’d bought his mother, but one he’d bought himself.