I had spent years thinking of Fergus as my mother’s creature — spoiled, careless, quick to sneer — and it is uncomfortable to admit how much of that picture had been handed to me rather than earned by him.

We had been raised, I was beginning to see, as two halves of the same lie: I was told he was the favored one who would take everything, and he was told I was the cold one who despised him, and neither of us had ever thought to check the story against the person it described.

Now here he was at my kitchen table at eight in the morning, unshaven and undone, and the arrogance I had always resented turned out to have been a thin shell over a frightened man who had never once been told the truth about his own family.

“I keep thinking about Dad,” he said, staring into the mug.