But that is not what it was, and I have come to feel it is important to say so.

My son did not humiliate his father out of revenge.

A ten-year-old is not capable of the cold satisfaction revenge requires; that is an adult appetite, and Otis did not have it.

What he had was simpler and much harder to bear.

He had a mother he loved, whom he had watched be hurt, and he had the truth, and he had reached the end of what he could stand to watch.

He did not want his father to suffer.