Colby was two years younger than me, and he had gotten the worse of it, because my father had needed a son to inherit his empire and Colby had never once fit the shape my father tried to force him into.

He had wanted to teach.

He had been good with kids, patient, funny — the opposite of my father in every way that my father found contemptible.

And my father had steamrolled all of it, installed him at the dealership at twenty-two, and spent every family dinner since carving away at whatever was left of him, until Colby had gone quiet and gray and stopped meeting anyone’s eyes.

Watching him weep with relief in that front pew, I felt something fierce rise up in me on his behalf, because I knew exactly what those tears were.

They were the sound of a cage door opening.