accommodate it so automatically that after a while you forget it’s there until suddenly you’re limping and you don’t know why.
The secret of how the boys had come to him, the uncertainty about the night he found them, the thing he’d seen when he went back to the school the following morning that he had never, not once in 20 years, told another living soul, that secret embedded itself in Walter Briggs and it quietly altered everything.
It made him private.
It made him careful.
It made him a
