“You,” she said, and now her voice had turned to attack, because attack was the only card she had left, “you disappear for four years, and you come marching back in here and treat your own mother, your own brother, like criminals?

You have no idea what we’ve dealt with.”

I did not shout.

I only rolled up my sleeve.

I showed her my forearm — the shining burn scars, the old cuts, the marks four years of failing machines and molten metal had left in my skin.

“I worked whole nights,” I said.

“I slept in a room with four other men.

I spent two Christmases completely alone in a cold country so that no one back here would go without a single thing.”