I have kept that photograph — Brock at five, with the puppy — on my dresser through all of it, and people who know the story sometimes ask me how I can bear to look at it, and I tell them the truth, which is that it is the most important object I own.

Because it holds the two facts I have had to carry side by side, and it refuses to let me collapse them into one.

It would be easier, in a way, if I could tell myself that the boy in that photograph was always secretly the man at the farm — that the cruelty was there from the start, hidden, and that I simply failed to see it.

That would let me off a certain hook; it would make him a monster by nature, and my love for the child a kind of understandable mistake.