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

They are two, and they are one, and both of those are true, and I keep the photograph so that I am never tempted to make it simpler than it is.

Simplicity would be a mercy to me.

It would be a lie about both of them.

I owe them both the harder thing, which is to hold the whole truth, and grieve, and act anyway.

Chapter 6 — The Lost Years

The next morning I sat by Natasha’s hospital bed and asked her to tell me everything, and her story made me face my own guilt, which I had carried across an ocean without ever once setting it down.

Because I had seen the early signs, before Spain.