For fifteen years that identity had been the whole of me — the thing I was before I was anything else, the thing every other fact about me had been arranged around.

And I had set it down, in a rainy study, over the flame of a desk lamp, and discovered that underneath it there was still a person, and that the person was simply a son, and a brother, and that this was not less than what I had been but incomparably more.

“Bennett,” my mother said softly, from her wheelchair.

She gestured for me to come closer.