“I should have asked,” he said.

“That is something you can acknowledge without deciding facts we haven’t established.”

That night, Vincent drove alone to his childhood neighborhood in Bayonne.

The building where he grew up had become a dentist’s office.

Across the street stood the school auditorium where his father had once left an empty chair.

He thought about how fiercely he had pursued control.

At seventeen, he had sworn never again to depend on someone else’s kindness.

Somewhere along the way, he had begun to treat kindness as weakness.