“Just come with us, man.”

“I can’t,” Zachary said.

“I can’t do it.”

I watched my husband look at his younger brother with a concern so plain and so familiar that I had to grip the edge of the mattress.

He had looked at the boys that way.

He had looked at me that way.

It was simply how Lucas looked at the people who were his.

My husband divided the world, without ever saying so, into the people who were his and everyone else, and the people who were his received a devotion that had no bottom to it.