Blood ties us to the people who bring us into the world.

But it is loyalty, and integrity, and quiet, unpaid, unwitnessed love that actually makes a family — and Walt Prentice, who shared not one drop of blood with me, was the truest family I have ever had.

People ask me, sometimes, whether I hate them — my mother, my brother.

They expect that I must, after everything, and they seem almost disappointed when I tell them the truth, which is that I don’t, and that the not-hating is not forgiveness and not weakness but something colder and more final than either.

You can’t hate a fire for burning.