And in the end, he put one on me.” I did not know what to say to that, so I said nothing, and I let him sit with it.

But I have thought about his words many times since, because there was a hard and honest self-reckoning in them that I did not expect from a man who had every right, that day, to think only of his own injury.

Raymond did not cast Christopher as a monster and himself as an innocent victim, though he would have been entitled to.

He looked, instead, at his own part in the making of the man, at all the years of solving Christopher’s problems and paying his way and teaching him, by example, that every relationship was a transaction and every problem could be bought off.