Nobody in that room had asked him a single question about himself.

His grandmother had waited eleven years for a grandson and had met an actual child four times, and she had been introducing an idea.

I never met him.

I never will, and that is correct, and I have made my peace with it.

But I want it written down somewhere that on the worst night of my adult life I watched him sit on a step with a plate he did not want, and that I was sorry for him, and that the sorriness arrived before anything else did — before the anger, before any of it.

Part Eleven: One in the Morning