My son did not need my hardness.

He needed my presence, and my tenderness, and the soft unguarded thing beneath the armor that I had spent my whole life pretending not to have.

And in reaching for me, he gave it back to me.

I have not tried to seal it shut again.

I have discovered that I do not want to, that a man walking around with that part of him open is not weaker for it but immeasurably more alive, and that I had been, by every measure that finally counts, half-dead for years inside a shell I was proud of.

Chapter 7 — Christopher