“You said something to me the other morning,” I said.

“I said a lot of things to you the other morning,” she said. “I said, ‘Oh God’ a few times if I remember right.”

“That wasn’t it.”

“Oh,” she said, clapping her hands against my chest. “The ‘I love you’ phrase. Is that what you mean. Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She unbuttoned my shirt down to my navel and ran her hands over my chest. “Well, what of it? I. Love. You.”

“Why?”

“Why?” she said.

I nodded.

“That’s the silliest question you’ve ever asked. Don’t you feel worthy of love, Patrick?”

“Maybe not,” I said as she touched the scar on my abdomen.

She met my eyes and hers were kind and warm, like benedictions. She leaned forward and my hands came out of her sweater as she slid down my body until her head was at my lap. She tore open the rest of my shirt and laid her face on the scar. She traced it with her tongue, then kissed it.

“I love this scar,” she said, resting her chin on it and looking up into my face. “I love it because it’s a mark of evil. That’s what your father was, Patrick. Evil. And he tried to pour it into you. But he failed. Because you’re kind and gentle, and you’re so good with Mae and she loves you so much.” She drummed the scar with her fingernails. “So, you see, your father lost because you are good, and if he didn’t love you, that’s his fucking problem, not yours. He was an asshole, and you are worthy of love.” She rose on all fours above me. “All of mine and all of Mae’s.”

I couldn’t speak for a minute. I looked into Grace’s face and I saw the flaws, I saw what she’d look like when she was old, how in fifteen or twenty years many men would never be able to see what an aesthetic wonder her face and body had been, and it was just as well. Because it didn’t mean shit in the long haul. I have said “I love you” to my ex-wife, Renee, and heard her say it, and we both knew it was a lie, a desperate want perhaps, but far removed from a reality. I loved my partner and I loved my sister and I’d loved my mother, though I never really knew her.

But I don’t think I ever felt anything like this.

When I tried to speak, my voice was shaky and hoarse and the words were strangled in my throat. My eyes felt wet and my heart felt as if it were bleeding.

When I was a boy, I loved my father, and he just kept hurting me. He wouldn’t stop. No matter how much I wept, no matter how much I pleaded, no matter how hard I tried to figure out what he wanted, what I could do to be worthy of his love instead of victim of his rage.