For all that time, she had understood Andrew’s repeated failures to stand up to his mother as a kind of weakness — an inability, a deficit of courage, something almost sympathetic, the way we sympathize with a person who wants to do right but cannot quite manage it.

She had told herself he was gentle, conflict-averse, caught between the women in his life.

And in that restaurant, his hand closing around her arm, she finally understood that it was not weakness at all.

Weakness would have been standing frozen, wanting to help his mother’s victim and failing to.

What Andrew did was not freezing.

It was choosing.

When his mother kicked a blind woman’s cane out of reach, Andrew’s body moved — decisively, without hesitation — and it moved to restrain the one person at that table who was trying to do something right.

He was not paralyzed between two sides.