There are moments when the kindest thing you can do for a person confessing a real wrong is to let them say it, and not rush in to make it smaller than it was.

He looked down again at Theodore, and his voice grew very quiet.

“That boy would be a grown man now.

Twenty-nine years old.” The number landed in the room like a struck bell.

Twenty-nine.

I felt the arithmetic click into place before I had consciously done the sum.

Brandon was twenty-nine.

Raymond had lost a son twenty-nine years ago.