“What do you mean, he threw you out?” I asked, very quietly.

Lucas looked at me with his exhausted, tear-swollen eyes.

“He opened the front door,” he said, “and he pushed me outside.

Into the rain.

He told me not to come back until I admitted that I stole the watch.” And then he added, in a small voice that I will hear in my memory for the rest of my life, “But I couldn’t admit it, Mom.

Because I didn’t do it.” There is a stubborn integrity in that sentence that undoes me every time I remember it.