A place Mason had competed for, and had not gotten.” Behind me, from the bed, I heard my son make a small, broken sound, and it was the worst sound I heard all night, worse than anything Arthur said, because it was the sound of a child understanding that he had nearly died in a freezing storm over his cousin’s jealousy about a science fair.

I have wished, many times, that Lucas had been spared that particular understanding, because there is something uniquely crushing about it.

A child can perhaps make some sense of suffering that comes from a storm, from bad luck, from an accident, from the impersonal forces of the world.

But to learn that you were put through something so terrible because a cousin was jealous, because a small mean lie was told and a grandfather chose to believe it without asking, is to be handed a truth about human cruelty that no nine-year-old should have to hold.

It is the smallness of the cause against the enormity of the consequence that wounds.