[ There’s part of him that wants to explain: he was a teenager, old enough to better. They were younger than he is now, too young to know better. They had four other children to worry about. They’d spent so long trying their awful bests. They were nothing like Byerly’s father.

But if Byerly, with a bastard-to-end-all-bastards for a father and a mother who abandoned him day after day without even leaving—if Byerly says they were wrong, even accounting for his obvious pro-Bastien bias, it has to be a little true. ]

Yeah.

[ Simple, quiet. But revelatory, after twenty-five years of insisting it was his own choice, to have permission to be angry.

He squeezes By’s hand in answer, not quite so hard. ]

But I do want to see them. [ It’s easier to be sure, with that nugget of squirming misery labeled something more specific than ??? bad feeling, do not touch. ] If they’re alive. And my brothers and sisters—they probably have children. I’ll look into it. I will.

If I find them, you have to come with me.