Vance explained it, the more I understood that my father had not merely been protecting himself from my anger.

He had been protecting me from something worse, from the terrible position of having to decide, cold, whether to forgive a stranger.

Imagine it, he seemed to be saying.

Imagine if a strange old man had appeared and said, I am your father, the one who left, and I have a long complicated story that explains everything.

Every instinct would have told me to distrust it.

I would have spent the little time we had interrogating his story, defending myself against the hope of it, holding him at arm’s length while I decided whether to believe him, and even if I had come to believe, the belief would have been grudging, negotiated, shadowed by all the years of hurt.