He sat there for a long time with the paper in his hands, and then he started to talk, in the disconnected way people do when a wall inside them has come down.

He talked about the things a son remembers.

Emlyn teaching him to drive in an empty parking lot, patient through every stalled start.

Emlyn in the third row at his high-school graduation, the only one of the family who had come.

The winter Fergus had wrecked a car and lied about it, and Emlyn had known he was lying and paid for the repair anyway and said only, Next time, come to me first. “He never once made me feel like I was less than you,” Fergus said.

“I always thought that was just because he was fair.