I stood up slowly from behind the desk.

“Told what?

Years ago?

Mother, what are you talking about?”

My mother looked directly into my eyes, the way she had when I was a child and she was about to tell me something that mattered, and I felt, absurdly, like that child again, braced for something I could not see coming.

It is a strange thing, to be a grown man feared across a city and to feel, in a single sentence from your mother, the whole architecture of your adulthood fall away, leaving the child underneath exposed and waiting.

I had faced men with guns without my pulse changing.