“Everybody thinks Eli is the wound,” Ethan said. “It’s the opposite. That’s what I can’t get anyone to hear.”

We were on the back steps. He talks better outside and side by side; he cannot do a conversation across a table.

“Dad decided the lake. I was nine. Nobody asked me. Then Dad decided Alaska, and Dad decided we don’t call Mom, and Dad decided which names we had that year — I was Tyler for eleven months, did you know that?

I was Tyler in a school in Wasilla and I had to remember it every morning.

“Then Dad died and Noah decided we still weren’t calling. He decided that for me. I was thirteen and I wanted to pick up a phone and he said no, and I couldn’t make him, so I left.

“And then I was in Oregon and I picked Eli. Out of nothing. I saw it on a delivery van and I liked it. And for three years nobody decided anything about me — where I slept, what I ate, who I was, what I did all day.