“They got caught in an alley by suppliers who’d decided they were no longer worth the risk. I was there. I shouldn’t have been—they’d warned me not to follow—but I thought I was old enough to get involved. Fifteen-year-olds know everything, in case you weren’t aware.”
The joke is too bitter for me to laugh at it. Especially when I can already see where this is going. “Oh, Mat.”
“If it weren’t for Afon,” he says, “I’d have gotten killed as gruesomely as my dad did. But Afon dragged me out while my father took on the worst of it.”
I close my eyes and think of a fifteen-year-old boy crouched behind a dumpster, looking when he was told not to look. The same boy who, fifteen years later, would haul a stranger out of an alley because he couldn’t stomach being the one who didn’t intervene.
“A
