“Sending an email to the wrong person is a mistake, Gavin,” I said.

“What you did were choices.”

I had thought a great deal, in the days before, about what I would say if he asked me for that — for the word mistake, for absolution, for the story in which he was a good man who had a bad night.

And I had decided I would give him the truth instead, because the truth was the one thing no one in his life had ever made him hold.

That was the engine of everything Gavin had become, I understood by then: he had never once, in his whole ascent, been made to sit with a consequence he could not blame on someone else.