And the thing about being that undefended with another person is that it is almost unbearably tender, every honest sentence landing with a decade behind it, and it is also the only way anything ever actually gets repaired, because you cannot mend a thing you are still holding your armor over.

I do not recommend waiting until your mother dies to take the armor off with the people you love.

But I understand, now, why so many of us do; it is the one thing reliably strong enough to make us.

We were forty-five and forty-eight years old, and we cried in our childhood living room over a lifetime of things we had each carried alone that we never once had to, and somewhere in the small hours I got my brother back, and he got me, and it did not fix the nine years but it ended them, which is a different thing and enough.

Chapter 12 — The Photographs