I have come to believe that those whispered promises are not lies, even when you do not know whether they are true.

They are a kind of vow.

Everything is going to be okay is not a prediction; it is a commitment, a mother telling her child, I am going to do everything in my power to make this okay, I am not going to leave you, I am going to see you through.

And in that sense every word of it was true, truer than I knew, because I was making, without realizing it, the very promise that Liam was at that moment breaking on the other side of those doors.

He was telling his mother he needed to leave.