Because I had spent his whole illness protecting him from what they were — softening my mother’s cruelties, inventing reasons for the missed visits, translating their indifference into something a sick man could bear to hear.

I had been doing what I always did in that family, which was absorb the impact so no one else had to feel it.

And in that room, that night, I understood that I was doing it still — and that it was a mistake.

Walt did not need to be protected from the truth of them anymore.

He needed, at the very end, to see it clearly, and to know that I saw it too, so that he would not die wondering if maybe he had been unfair, if maybe he had imagined the coldness, if maybe it was somehow his fault.

When he said save that recording, he was not being vengeful.