I could see Lucas with my own eyes, could touch him, could confirm again and again that he was alive and warming and going to be all right.

Julian had none of that.

He had only my voice on a phone describing a horror eight hundred miles away, and his own imagination to fill in everything I could not convey, and the agonizing helplessness of a father who cannot get to his child.

And laid over all of it, the additional and specific devastation that the people who had done this were his own parents, that the cruelty had come from the house he grew up in, that the mother who had left his son at the door was the same mother who had raised him.

He was not just frightened for Lucas.