My son sobbed the entire drive to his grandmother’s house. “Daddy, please don’t leave me here.” My wife snapped, “You’re babying him.” I left him anyway. Three hours later, a neighbor called. “Your little boy ran to my house shaking. He’s hiding under my bed and won’t stop crying.”

He was seventeen then, taller than William by nearly an inch, broad-shouldered from basketball, with his mother’s dark eyes and none of her cruelty. That thought still startled William sometimes—the way children are not destiny, even when raised in its shadow.

“You okay?” Owen asked quietly.

William smiled. “Yeah. Just thinking.”

“About what?”

William looked around the room. “How this all started because one little boy ran through a fence.”

Owen followed his gaze to the workshop participants. “That wasn’t all that started it.”

“No?”

“You started it too,” Owen said. “After. When you didn’t stop.”

William looked at him then, really looked. The scars were still there, though mostly invisible now. They would always be part of him. But so was this—this steadiness, this clarity, this refusal to inherit brutality as identity.

“You know,” Owen said, glancing toward the stage, “I’m thinking about majoring in psychology.”

William laughed softly. “Of course you are.”

“Or neuroscience. Or maybe both.”

“Ambitious.”

Owen shrugged. “Somebody has to explain to people how fear gets stuck in the brain.”

William’s throat tightened. “You’d be good at that.”

Owen’s smile was quick and crooked. “Probably.”