And there is truth in that, up to a point.

But there is a point past which that kind of love curdles into its opposite, past which the yes that feels like love becomes the very thing that destroys the person it is aimed at, and Manuel had spent five years and a valley of land and finally his own dignity discovering where that point lay.

When he stood on the porch and told Derek that he would not rescue him again, that he loved him too much to keep enabling him, that his son had to fix his own life because fixing it for him was what had broken him, Manuel was doing the hardest thing a loving parent can do, and also, in that moment, the most loving.

Because the refusal was not a withdrawal of love.