What exactly did you see?

What else did Grandma say?

How many times?

I wanted every one of those answers with a desperation that is hard to describe.

And I understood, even in my desperation, that getting them from Theo would cost him something I could never give back.

Because a child who has just been brave enough to set down a secret does not need to discover that setting it down only summoned a new set of demands.

He does not need to learn that his mother, too, wants something from him, wants him to perform, to remember, to produce.