I need to say more about that car ride, because it was where my son finally got to be twelve again, and I have never been more grateful for anything.

For weeks he had been a strategist, a spy, a boy holding a bomb with steady hands.

And in the back of that patrol car, with his father in custody and the evidence in the hands of people who could use it and his mother’s arms around him, all of that finally came off him at once, and what was left underneath was just a frightened, exhausted little boy who had been carrying far too much for far too long, crying into his mother’s shoulder.

I held him and I did not tell him to be brave, because he had been brave enough for a lifetime; I just let him be small, and scared, and mine, and twelve.

I understood, holding him, that the hardest part of what he had done was not the danger or the cleverness.

It was the loneliness — weeks and weeks of it, carrying the whole thing alone behind a mask, unable to let even me see the boy underneath.