It’s not a good time. Those had never been about protecting the children from the pain of remembering their father.

They had been about keeping me from seeing that these two children were being neglected — left alone, left hungry — while a woman told the whole family how devoted she was.

I looked at Daisy’s cracker-crumbed face and Mason’s watchful eyes, and I understood, all at once, exactly what my three years of respectful distance had cost.

It was Mason’s eat slow, Daisy that finished me.

Not the hunger itself, though the hunger was terrible to watch — it was the way my six-year-old nephew, at the absolute end of his own strength, still had one hand and one thought left over for his sister.