Julian read that one out loud to me and then said: “That’s the one, Mom.

That’s the one that got me.”

Because he had spent fourteen years believing he was the main event in a hundred and ninety people’s memories.

He was not.

He was the main event in about nine of them, and a vague unease in about a dozen more, and to the rest of that year group he was a boy they could not have picked out of a photograph.

Which is not a mercy.