He did not excuse what Christopher had done.

Nothing could excuse it.

But he refused the easy comfort of pretending he had played no role in the soil it grew from.

There is a rare kind of honesty in a person who, even in the hour of being most wronged, still asks what he himself might have done differently.

It is the honesty of a man who intends, at last, to change.

The months that followed were long and hard in a way that had nothing to do with courtrooms.