When I said the year out loud he looked at me the way you look at someone being deliberately difficult.

Then, around four, he stopped mid-sentence and said, “Where’s your mother?”

My mother has been dead since I was nineteen.

And then, twenty minutes later, he was back, and he knew where he was, and he understood approximately what had happened, and he cried — once, briefly, furiously, wiping his face with the heel of his hand like a man swatting something — and said, “Don’t you dare tell your brother.”

I called Marcus at six.

He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is not like him, and then said, “What do you want me to do about it, Claire?”