They didn’t want one.” He said it without bitterness, which was somehow worse than bitterness would have been; he had clearly made his peace with the arithmetic of it long ago, the brutal market logic by which small children are wanted and teenagers are not.

“And the adults,” he went on, “they all kept coming to me.

Asking me what I thought was best.

For her.

I was fourteen.”

“Who asked you that?” I said.

There was a sharp pain starting somewhere under my ribs.

“All of them.