“You planned this,” he said.

I shook my head.

“You documented it yourself.” But it was Otis who said the truest thing, quietly, not as an accusation but as a simple fact.

“You started it,” he told his father, “when you laughed at Mom.”

I want to sit for a moment with Kingston’s accusation, because it reveals him completely. You planned this. Even then, even standing in the ruins of his own wedding surrounded by the evidence of his own conduct, his first instinct was to make himself the victim of a scheme.

He could not conceive that this had simply happened — that a boy had found the truth and told it.