Whatever it was, whenever he had made it, I wanted to beg him to release himself from it, to protect the son I still had from becoming the target of an entire auditorium’s cruelty.

I had already lost one child.

The terror of watching the other one deliberately walk into a crowd that would mock him was almost more than I could bear.

But there was something in his face, in the quiet certainty of those three words, that stopped me.

I made a promise.

I did not yet know to whom, or what it was.

I only knew that my son would not be moved.