He told me he had found something years ago that he should have acted on and hadn’t, because acting on it would have hurt a boy who had done nothing wrong.

He told me the boy — my brother — was not to blame for any of it.

He told me where he had put the things that mattered, and made me repeat the locker number back to him twice.

And then he asked me, almost shyly, whether I thought a man could love a child he had no blood claim to, entirely and without reservation, for the child’s whole life, and I said of course, and he closed his eyes and said, Good.

Then I did the one thing right. I did not understand that sentence at the time.