But it was the cowardice of a man too afraid of a pain to face it, not the coldness of a man who felt no pain at all.

And the tragedy of it, the thing that grief teaches those willing to learn, is that his strategy did not work.

You cannot outrun a grief by refusing to feel it; you can only postpone it, and let it calcify, and pass its weight, unfelt, onto the people around you, which is exactly what Caleb did, for seventeen years, to his son.

What broke his wall, in the end, was not an argument.