He said, in Dr.

Petrosyan’s office, “They don’t get to find out what I did from us.

Not at this age.

If they find out at nineteen and they hate me then, that’s mine to carry.”

He was right.

I have never told them.

Nina worked it out at about fifteen, from a comment an older cousin made at a christening, and came home and asked me directly, and I said yes, and I gave her the two-sentence version and nothing else, and I did not editorialize, which cost me something.

She was furious with him for about a year and a half and then, being her grandmother’s granddaughter, made her own arrangement with it.