He closed the book he was holding and looked up at me, and there was a seriousness in his face, but it was not the heavy, watchful seriousness of the boy with the notebook.

It was something cleaner, something almost bright.

I have wondered, watching Leo grow into the young man he is becoming, whether what happened will mark him, and of course in some ways it must; nothing that heavy passes through a child without leaving a print.

But the print I see is not the one I feared.

I had been afraid he would come out of it cynical, distrustful, a boy who had learned too early that the people you love will lie to you.

Instead, somehow, he came out of it with a fierce and specific faith, not in people, exactly, but in fairness, in the idea that there ought to be rules and that the rules ought to protect the person with less power rather than the person with more.