A grown man delivering that line would have loaded it with blame, would have made it a weapon.

Lucas simply said it, plainly, as the answer to a question, as the obvious fact that it was.

Why didn’t you stay on the porch.

Because nobody would open the door for me.

He was not trying to wound his grandfather.

He was just explaining, with a child’s terrible directness, the logic of his own actions: he had left the porch and gone out into the storm to look for help because the alternative was to keep standing at a door that was never going to open, and a nine-year-old, however frightened, understands that you cannot save yourself by waiting at a door that stays shut.

The simplicity of it was the whole horror of it.