The same disease that had made his father bury a child had made his son disown one.

“I don’t say that to excuse it,” Matthias said.

“There’s no excuse.

I say it because I finally understand where it came from, and I couldn’t fix it before because I couldn’t see it.” I believed him.

And I want to be honest that believing him did not resolve anything, because the question was never whether he understood himself.

The question was whether a person can truly change the thing at their own root, or only learn to watch it more carefully — and that is not a question anyone can answer with a journal and three months.