They had stood in roughly the same relation to the boy.

And everything about how they responded was opposite, and the difference was not circumstance or distance or luck.

The difference was simply what each of them believed a father was for.

Arthur believed a father, or a grandfather, was an authority to be obeyed, a dispenser of discipline and consequence.

Julian, that night, chose to believe something else, something he had to fight his own upbringing to reach: that a father is the person who comes, no matter what, through any storm, to the child who needs him.

Watching him make that choice, I understood that the cruelty in that family, however deep it ran, was not destiny.