That was all.

Three words, spoken quietly and with great certainty, and then she squeezed my hand and looked back out the window at the garden, content, as if she had said the only thing that needed saying.

I did not know what to do with it.

I was not a good man, I thought.

I was a man who had been paid to sit in her room and answer to her son’s name, a man built on a lie she could not see.

I did not understand, that afternoon, how completely I had it backwards.