“My mother knew?” he said, and his voice was barely a voice at all.

“My mother knew he was innocent, and she left him outside?” “Yes,” I said.

There was nothing else to say.

I heard, over the line, the sound of a man’s entire understanding of his own family coming apart in real time, eight hundred miles away, alone in a hotel room, unable to reach his son.

I have thought about how much worse it must have been for Julian, in some ways, than for me, in those first hours.

I at least was there.