“And besides – he’s so proud of being a man – it’d be so painful and humiliating for him to know that he owed anything to me. It’d completely wreck our relationship.”
“For as long as I could recall, my mother had simply called me ‘Son,’ and, since her name was Asta, ‘Asta’s son’ became my common name. In a world in which one lived by the light of a father’s name and rank, that meant—since I had no father—I existed in a shadow.”