So she went to Connecticut and raised him quietly and told him, when he asked about his father, only that he was a man who could not be part of their lives.

And then, when Fabian was eleven, she moved them back — for a job, for family of her own, for reasons that had nothing to do with the Selwyns — and by a coincidence so cruel it sounds invented, her son and Bertram’s other son washed up in the same middle-school homeroom and became, within a month, inseparable.

“I didn’t know,” Fabian said.

“For six years I didn’t know.

You were just my best friend.

Your house was the place I wanted to be.