That is the thing about grief that Caleb learned too late but not, thank God, entirely too late: that the pain you refuse to feel does not spare you, it only waits, and the only way out of it is through it.

Julian went through it, in a red dress, in front of everyone.

And in going through it himself, he finally showed his father the way.

Chapter 19 — The Promise Kept

The next morning, I braced myself for the coverage.

I knew how these things traveled now, in the age of the phones that had surely filmed my son, and I feared what the internet and the local papers would make of a boy who wore a dress to his graduation.

I need not have feared.