“I was fourteen years old,” he said, looking down at his hands, and in his face I could see the fourteen-year-old he was describing, a child being handed a decision no child should ever be handed.

They had dressed it up as empowerment, I suppose — asking him, consulting him, letting him have a say.

But there is a cruelty in handing a frightened child the appearance of a choice when the real decision has already been made by the adults, because then the child gets to carry the weight of having chosen, forever, without ever having had any genuine power to choose otherwise.

They had let a fourteen-year-old believe he was the author of his sister’s leaving, and he had believed it, and he had spent the five years since punishing himself for a decision that had never really, truly been his to make.