He had not come up to the casket.

He had not embraced Matthias’s mother.

At the time I had thought it was respect, a friend keeping a polite distance from a family’s private grief.

Now I understood I had watched a son bury his own father in total secrecy, forbidden even to stand near the grave, grieving behind a rope he was never allowed to cross.

He had come to say goodbye to the man who made him and denied him, and he had been permitted to do it only as a guest at the back of the room, one more mourner among the acquaintances, while Matthias sat in the front pew and received the condolences owed to a son.

I remembered glancing back and seeing him there and thinking nothing of it.