They are, in fact, crippling him, robbing him of the one thing that actually builds a person, which is the experience of facing and surviving the consequences of his own choices.

Manuel’s love, unbounded, had not protected Derek.

It had deformed him.

And the deformity had, years later, come home to roost, in a shed, in the treatment of the very man whose boundless love had caused it.

Chapter 12 — Bit by Bit

Manuel explained the rest of it, in the quiet of his old workshop, and it was the oldest and most patient kind of theft, the kind that happens so gradually that the victim adjusts to each new indignity before noticing it was one.

When Derek and Veronica had asked to move into the Savannah house, they had promised it would be for three months, only three months, while they got back on their feet.