He had learned that being a good brother meant being an erased one.

And a child who learns that lesson does not just suffer under it — he builds himself around it, becomes a person whose whole worth is measured in what he gives up, who cannot imagine a love that does not cost him his own existence.

That is a wound you cannot see, and it does not show on an X-ray, and it is in some ways the one I most wanted to heal: the belief that he was only allowed to take up space by giving it all away.

The race car was where I got to prove the new math to him.