To sit still with every nerve firing, to hold your position when instinct is howling at you to move, because you have learned that the wrong action taken fast is worse than the right action taken slow.

I had a wife flinching from my hand and a brother wearing my watch downstairs, and everything I was trained to be wanted to get up in that dark and go end it with my hands.

And I knew — the way you know things in your body after enough years — that if I did, I would lose.

I would frighten Ingrid worse.

I would give my mother the unstable, violent son she could describe to a room.

I would trade the one advantage I had, which was that they did not yet know I knew, for the brief animal satisfaction of a fist.