Don’t do this to your own blood. Not one of them, I noticed, had reached out during the six weeks my wife was starving in a cold apartment.

Not one of them had asked whether my son was all right.

They surfaced only when the consequences did, and only ever on behalf of the guilty.

I did not argue with any of them.

I sent a single message, the same message, to every relative who had asked me to show mercy to the people who had nearly killed my wife and my child.

When my wife was bleeding on the floor and my son was freezing in his crib, my mother was drinking champagne on a rooftop in Miami.