Because Julian loved his parents, when he reached adulthood, he tried to escape this fate by moving far away. But his parents were bereft and sought him out over many miles and many years, wondering why he had abandoned them. When they finally located him, they were old, weary, and terribly sick. They knocked on the door to his cottage, and Julian’s wife answered. She hurried the elderly couple to bed and told them to rest while she ran off to fetch a healer. While she was gone, Julian came home and found two people asleep in his bed. He assumed his wife was sleeping with another man, and in a blind rage, he yanked his sword from its scabbard and stabbed them both to death, fulfilling the stag’s prophecy.

Agatha told of a stone carving illustrating Julian’s story that can be found hidden away on rue Galande in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It is said to be mortared onto a building about ten feet above the cobbled street, just around the corner from his namesake cathedral, Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre.

“Have you ever been there?” he asked his mother.

“I don’t need Paris when I have Boise,” she said and kissed him on the forehead. “I don’t need the world, because you’re my world.”

“But what’s the lesson of the story?”

“The deer is the devil. He never should have listened to the devil.”

“How is the deer the devil?” he said.

“It has horns,” she said. “Like a devil. He should have stayed with his parents. Then none of that trouble would ever have happened.”

“But . . . wait . . . why is Julian a saint?”

“What’s that, sweet pea?”

“If he killed his parents, why is he a saint?”

“Oh, don’t go worrying about all the little details. I told you the part of the story that matters most.”

He knew what she was trying to say, and the threat worked. He couldn’t help but believe, through a combination of guilt, anxiety, threat, and superstition, that he was better off by her side. He couldn’t help but see every temptation as a stag. When a brochure came in the mail for a two-week science camp, he discovered a deer in its pages. When he fantasized in the shower about a girl in his AP chemistry class, he saw her with horns branching out of her head. When an Ivy League college called to recruit him after he scored 1550 on the SAT, he could only imagine its campus existed in a sunlit forest surrounded by antler-locked gates.