I told her I won’t pay another cent toward Sorrel’s debts, that they have to sell the car, that they have to face what they did.

She called me an ungrateful son.

Sorrel said I was ruining her life.”

“They didn’t force you to lie to me for two years,” Odalind said.

“That was yours.”

I believed him that he had finally stood up to his mother, and I want to be fair and say that it was, for him, an enormous thing — the hardest thing he had ever done.