Lucas was cold and hurt and exhausted and had come within a narrow margin of dying, and the thing he needed his mother to know before anything else was that he was not a thief.

Children care so much about being believed, about being known to be good, and they are so vulnerable to the judgment of the adults they love.

To be called a liar by a grandfather, to be cast out as a thief, is a wound of a particular kind, a wound to a child’s whole sense of himself as a person worthy of trust.

The cold had nearly taken his life.