“Richard, did you help him?

Did you help that boy?” My father opened his mouth, and for a moment nothing came out at all, and in that silence I felt the last ten years of my life begin, quietly, to rearrange themselves into a shape I had never imagined.

Chapter 16 — Did You Help Him

My father could not answer her.

He sat with his mouth slightly open and no words coming, staring down at the photograph, at the line written across the bottom in Julian’s hand: YOUR FATHER TRIED TO WARN THEM.

He read it, I think, a dozen times in the space of that silence, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something he could bear.