It is a terrible thing to admit how convenient a comforting lie can be to a busy man.
I should be honest about the shape of that convenience, because it is the real reason a good son can vanish for ten years.
Ezra was not a callous man.
He thought about his parents constantly — but he thought about them the way you think about a bill you’ve already paid, a thing handled, a box checked.
The money going out each month was, in his mind, love made concrete.
It let him believe that the fourteen-hour days were themselves an act of devotion, that every family he seated in one of his residences was somehow a family he was tending in place of his own.