Not you.

Never you.” He looked at me for a long time in the passing streetlights.

And I don’t know if he believed me yet.

But I made a vow, in that car, that I would say it to him every day for as long as it took until he did.

And I did.

That is the boring, unglamorous part that no one puts in the stories — the daily repetition of a truth into a child who has been taught a lie about himself.

It is not a single dramatic speech in a dark car that heals a boy who has spent ten years being made to feel defective.