He carried the box downstairs and set it out on the front porch.

“I already bought a laptop,” he told his father through the screen door, “with my scholarship and my summer job.” “But it’s a gift from your dad!” Marcus said.

Ethan looked at him with a flat, finished calm.

“That’s exactly why I don’t want it.

An expensive gift doesn’t buy back a childhood.” Marcus stood in the driveway a long time after that, and I watched him from the window, and I thought about all the cold evenings Ethan had stood at that same door waiting for a car — except that Ethan had been a child, and Marcus was a grown man, meeting the consequences of things he had chosen with both eyes open.

It was during the discovery phase that his own lawyers, of all people, entered the recording that finished it — a voicemail from Evelyn, frantic: You can’t abandon us now, Marcus, Dylan thinks of you as his real father! And Marcus’s reply, exhausted, defeated: That’s the whole problem, Evelyn.