It was the wound at the center of my life, the thing I built everything else around.

I could not have known, standing there being cast out, that I was misreading the most important scene I would ever live through, that the coldness on my father’s face was not indifference but terror, that the man ordering me out of his house was doing the single hardest and most frightening thing he had ever done, and doing it, in his broken way, for me.

If I had known, that night, it might have changed everything.

But I did not know, and he did not tell me, and so the misreading stood for ten years and shaped both our lives.