It was just true, and the truth of it was quieter and heavier than any accusation.

Nicolas had spent a decade treating a son as a thing he was owed, a prize the universe had been unfairly withholding, and he had never once stopped to ask whether he was the kind of father a son deserves to have.

That was the inversion at the root of everything.

He had been so consumed with whether the child would be worthy of him — the right sex, the right face, carrying the name properly forward — that it had never occurred to him to wonder whether he was worthy of the child.

And he was not.

A man who could look at his own newborn and see a rival’s bastard, who could threaten a laboring woman with the street, who could set a crying infant down like returned merchandise — that man had been handed a miracle he was nowhere near ready to receive.