To Dustin’s brother’s credit, he didn’t leave his mother on the floor and flee like his two loser friends did. (They were apprehended outside the building.) When the police entered the apartment ten minutes later, they found Nicholas sitting on the couch next to his mother, administering a bag of frozen peas to the bump on the back of her head. Nicholas had begged his mother to lie for him and tell the cops he had been asleep in his room when the two men broke into her apartment, but she had refused. “I’d throw myself in front of a bus for you, but I won’t lie.” Dustin knew that statement was true because it was one of the things that both Nicholas and his mother mentioned in their account of the night’s events.

By the time Dustin and his father arrived, his mom had taken a double dose of Valium, which had already started to kick in. She asked them to stay for the night, and neither could refuse upon seeing this shell-shocked and devastated woman.

That night provided the opportunity for the first heart-to-heart Dustin had ever had with his dad. Well, there had been one non-conversation about sex when Dustin was thirteen, but it consisted of his dad coming into his bedroom when he was studying and saying, “Your mom asked me to come over to have the sex talk with you. Do you need it?” Dustin responded in the negative, and his father exhibited visible relief. His father then informed his young son that he now had to hang out in his bedroom for the next half hour so he could report back to his ex-wife he’d done as he was told. Dustin and his dad watched Game of Thrones in Dustin’s room, both staring in awestruck silence at the lesbian scene in Lord Baelish’s brothel. It was one of the most awkward moments of his life.