I want to be clear that I had no illusions about my standing to say any of it.

I was not this boy’s father; I had been, at best, a cold and intermittent presence in his life, a wallet with a stern voice, a man he called by his first name because neither of us had ever earned anything warmer.

And I understood, kneeling there, that I had wronged him too — not in the enormous way I had wronged Hugo and Atticus, but in a quieter and more insidious way.

I had watched Delphine turn her own son into a performance, a thing to be graded and displayed, and I had not only permitted it but paid for it, because a trophy stepson polished the family image I was curating, and a broken one could be hidden behind good schools and better tutors.