I want to be fair to Darius, because it would be easy to tell this story as though he were a fool or a coward, and he was neither.

He was a son watching indisputable proof that the woman who raised him, the mother he loved, was a murderer who had spent a decade trying to kill his wife under his own roof.

There is no way to receive that gently.

I watched it hit him, and it was like watching a building come down — the whole structure of his life, his childhood, his understanding of the person at its center, collapsing in the space of a two-minute video.

And here is the thing I will always honor him for: in the wreckage of that collapse, with his entire past crumbling, he did not hesitate about the future.

He did not argue with the footage, did not defend her, did not beg me to consider that there might be some explanation.