He told me the shape of the last two decades in a flat voice, the way people tell you about a war.

He had not attended his own mother’s funeral.

He had watched his children grow up in photographs Gus smuggled to him.

He had built a life the size of a shack because the alternative Denton had promised was worse than any cage, and he had believed the promise, because he had already seen what these men would do to a partner who became inconvenient.

“I told myself I was protecting my family by disappearing,” Rufus said.