I had done to Auberon a smaller version of the thing I had done to my own children: I had valued him for what he could reflect back onto me, and discarded the actual child inside the arrangement.

The difference was that Auberon was still here, still reachable, still young enough that the lock could be made to click open instead of clicking permanently shut.

I could not undo Queens.

But I could, for once in my life, do the un-strategic thing — kneel on my own marble floor and tell a frightened boy who was not even mine by blood that he was allowed to simply exist, unmeasured, unpriced, unperformed.

It was the first genuinely fatherly thing I had ever done, and I did it, fittingly, for a child I was about to lose in a divorce, expecting nothing back.