“Drink some water, sir,” Hugo said.

“You look dehydrated.” Sir. Spoken politely, without a trace of malice, and it hit me with the force of a fist.

It was a wall of ice.

It was the boundary a boy draws when he knows exactly what he is worth.

I understood, sitting there with the water my son had brought me, exactly what that word was doing, because it was the most sophisticated thing anyone had ever said to me and it was one syllable long. Sir was not cruelty.

Cruelty would have been a gift — it would have meant I still mattered enough to wound, that some raw nerve still connected us. Sir was the opposite.