It will be the protection of the woman who sacrificed everything to care for me.

Goodbye, my son.

I hope, one day, you become someone your mitten would have been proud of.

Julian was weeping now, his head down, staring at the floorboards.

No one in the room moved to comfort him.

And I found, watching him, that the anger had gone out of me, and left behind only a vast and final sadness — for Evelyn, mostly, who had loved this man from a mitten to a grave, and had to spend her last strength defending herself and me against him.