They walked, the three of them, toward a coffee shop, and over the next hour she asked him the hard, direct questions.

She was, he would come to learn, a child who did not do small talk — who had been raised by a mother that told her the truth about difficult things, and who therefore expected the truth in return and could tell, with unnerving accuracy, when she wasn’t getting it.

“Why didn’t you believe my mom when she told you the truth?” she asked, looking straight into his eyes over her hot chocolate.

He had promised himself, driving there, that whatever she asked, he would not soften it.

“Because I was insecure, and I was a coward,” he said.

“Your mother was better at her job than I was at mine.