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

I called a private hospital, and then I called Mr.

Montgomery, a respected attorney I had known for years, and I began, at sixty, in a diner booth, to do the thing I should have done long before I ever got on a plane to Spain.

That number — six years — is the one that has stayed with me the longest, more even than the two weeks without food, because I understood something looking at it that I had not understood before.

What Brock had done to Natasha was not only what he did with his hands or with the coop.