And he kept hearing the thing the boy had asked him, almost pleading, before they left the park: please don’t ask Dad about it.

Dad will get mad. A six-year-old does not learn that particular fear from a father who is only strict.

Ellard lay in the dark and understood, for the first time, that some of the things he had spent six years not asking about were things he had chosen not to ask about, because the not-asking was easier than whatever the answers might be.

He made himself go through it that night, honestly, the way you probe a sore tooth.

Radley had never once let him past the front porch — in six years, not once inside the house where his own grandson lived.

He had told himself that was Radley’s grief, a private man guarding a wounded home.