People ask me, sometimes, whether it was hard to prosecute my own brother.

They expect me to say yes, that blood is blood, that some part of me mourned him.

And there is a version of the truth in that.

But the cleaner truth is the one I gave my father, later, on the deck of the cabin we got back: that Julian stopped being my brother somewhere in the months he spent hurting our father under a coat, and that the man the troopers walked out of that house was a stranger who happened to share my childhood, and that I did not prosecute my brother.

I protected my father from the man my brother had become.