For ten years I had carried the true Julian around inside me like a candle I had to keep cupped against the wind, the real him, the brave and gentle him, while the world either forgot him or remembered him wrongly.

To watch that finally reverse, to watch the true story of him become the official story, the remembered story, the one carved into a bench and printed in the news and taught, I hoped, to the children of the town he had saved, was to feel a wind that had been blowing against me for a decade finally still.

After ten years, I could finally stop cupping the candle.

The truth of him was safe now, out in the open, where it could not be blown out.