It was not a flattering story, and Dell did not try to make it one.

What Fergus wanted, I think, was not an apology so much as an accounting — the plain facts of how he had come to be, told by someone who was finally willing to tell them.

My brother is a more generous man than I might have been in his place.

He did not forgive Dell that first afternoon, and Dell did not ask him to.

But he went back the next month, and the month after, and somewhere in those slow visits the two of them built the only kind of relationship that ever lasts between people who have hurt each other — one made of showing up, again and again, and not lying anymore.