I saw him reach for the certainty that had served him so well in the hospital — the I know what I’m looking at certainty — and find it gone, because for once what he was looking at could not be waved away with confidence.

And I felt, watching him, a complicated thing I had not expected to feel: not triumph, though I’d wanted his certainty punished, but something closer to pity.

Because I knew what it was to have the floor of your own life pulled up in a single sentence.

It had happened to me two weeks earlier, in a recovery room, at his hands.

And now it was happening to him, and I understood, watching his face come apart, that we were finally, terribly, standing on the same ground — two people who had each believed they knew the shape of their own family, learning in the same season how little either of us had known.

Chapter 14 — What Bertram Buried