Stacked in boxes in a closet, every one still in the paper I’d wrapped it in, hidden away where two children who thought their uncle had forgotten them would never see that he hadn’t.

I sat in my truck in the county parking lot with those boxes in the back and I cried the way you cry maybe twice in a life, because I understood at last the full architecture of what had been built — that it hadn’t been enough to keep me out, that the proof I was still out there trying had to be hidden too, so that Ollie could be told, and could come to believe, that nobody was coming.

It was the hiding that got me, more than anything.

Keeping me away I could almost understand as a kind of sickness, a control, a grief gone wrong.