Reached for: Cactus Flowers

Conduct is kept scrupulously correct and hard situations are entered deliberately, as though a debt were being serviced by the difficulty itself. The account was opened in a family that handed out blame freely while leaning on the same child to keep everything upright, fusing guilt and indispensability into a single position. What it asks for is naming what the payment is actually for.

I hold myself to a line nobody else can even see. I owe that much.

Peter, who denied what he loved beside a courtyard fire and spent the rest of his life making it good. The form implies a task of accepting a forgiveness that was already issued.