Leo’s version of that autumn, which he told a guardian ad litem named Wendy Achebe in the following February, in a room with the door shut, and which I did not read until nineteen months later when I was legally entitled to, was this:

He thought it was about money and he thought we did not have any and he thought this was a thing he could help with.

So at seven years old he stopped asking for things.

He stopped asking for things so thoroughly and so quietly that it took me eleven weeks to notice, and I noticed because he told a woman at a supermarket that he did not like the birthday party he had been invited to, and he had liked that child since kindergarten.

He had worked out that the party required a present.