It was never as simple as Zachary loving Tristan more, though he did.

It was that in every collision between the two children, no matter what had actually happened, the accounting had already been settled before the facts were in — Tristan was owed, and Chloe was overdrawn, and so any dispute resolved, automatically, in the direction of the debt he felt he owed his son.

A full boy’s whim outweighed a hungry girl’s need, not because anyone had weighed them, but because the scale had been rigged years before either child sat down at the table.

And the terrible thing about a rigged scale is what it does to the child on the losing side of it.