He cannot sit in front of one ten-year-old boy and be a father who failed and is trying anyway, because that requires a kind of courage he does not have — the ordinary, unwitnessed courage of showing up small.

He chose the microphone over the boy three years ago.

He is still, every month, choosing the microphone over the boy, by declining the call, because the call would require him to be seen without one.

That is not my revenge.

It is just his character, playing out to its end.

And I have made a kind of peace with the sadness of it, on Leo’s behalf more than my own.

There is a version of this story in which Luca, having lost everything, finally becomes humble enough to be a real father from the bottom of the ladder — in which the fall breaks his ego open and lets something better grow.