They looked at my mother.

They looked at her hard.

But there wasn’t enough — there was never enough — and after a while they stopped looking, and it was just the two of us, and she told me every day for the rest of my childhood that everyone leaves, that everyone lies, that the only person in the world who would never abandon me was her.” I sat down across from him.

“Julian.

Why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?” He couldn’t meet my eyes.

He told me that after his father died Victoria had lost nearly everything — money, standing, the life she’d had — and that he had stayed close to her, all through his teens and his twenties, because he had genuinely believed she needed him, that he was all she had, that leaving her alone would be a kind of murder itself.