His softness had never been the absence of strength; it was strength deliberately held back, a large and gentle man choosing, over and over, not to use his size, because using it frightened him more than being run over did.

And now, finally, standing in the wreckage of everything he’d believed about his own family, he stopped holding it back.

There was no rage in it, which was what made it terrible to watch.

He simply stood up to his full height and became, in one moment, the man he could have been all along if he had ever once decided that some things were worth the fight.

It was the saddest and the proudest I have ever been of anyone.