This had not started with Veronica.

It had started years earlier, when his parents had confused protecting Derek with enabling him, when they had taught their younger son, with the best of intentions and the worst of results, that his father’s love would always, always absorb the consequences of his failures.

Standing at that dusty workshop window, Alvin understood something about his family that reframed the entire tragedy, and it was a hard and unwelcome understanding, because it meant that the villains of the story were not the only ones who had made it possible.

Veronica had committed the theft.