Loving Your Child Is an Instinct; Shielding Him From the Consequences of What He Did to Another Human Being Is Something Else Entirely — I Learned the Difference at Sixty, at the Door of a Chicken Coop

But it is not true, and the photograph will not let me pretend it is.

The boy in that picture was real.

He was gentle.

He begged to keep a stray.

He fell asleep against a dog.

Something happened between that boy and the man in the courtroom — grief, and power, and the slow rot that comes to a person who is never once told no, never once made to face a consequence — and I do not fully understand it and I never will.

But I will not dishonor the boy by pretending he was always the man, and I will not dishonor Natasha by pretending the man was still the boy.