“I’m not asking you to forgive Christopher,” she said.

“I just want you to know that he really did love you.”

And I looked at her, and I gave her the truest answer I have, the one this entire ordeal taught me, the sentence I would build the rest of my understanding of people around.

“Then he learned, far too late,” I said, “that loving someone and protecting them are not two different things.”

I have thought about that sentence more than any other, in the years since, because it is the lie at the center of every person who failed me in that house.