If he believed a thing, he announced it to the room, and the announcing was, to his mind, the same as proving it.

If anyone corrected him — on a fact, a date, a figure, anything — he took the correction not as information but as an insult, a challenge to his authority that had to be crushed.

I learned very young that the fastest way to survive an argument with my father was to stop having it.

To go quiet.

To make myself small and let the storm pass over me.

Declan hated that in me.