It was love in its most demanding and least comfortable form: the love that wants the beloved to actually become whole, rather than merely to be spared discomfort; the love that is willing to let a grown child face hard consequences because facing them is the only path to becoming a person who can stand on his own.

The easy love, the reflexive rescue, had produced a man who let his parents be robbed rather than face his debts.

The hard love, the boundary, the no, was the only thing that might yet produce a man who could take responsibility for his own life.

Manuel had loved Derek wrongly for decades, generously and disastrously, and on that porch, at last, he loved him rightly, which meant, for the first time, refusing him.

It was the truest gift he ever gave his younger son, and it was wrapped in the word he had never before been able to say to him, which was no.