When sculptors shape their stone, they shape it after him.

‘A golden cage is still a cage.’

‘Wrong,’ he said. ‘A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.’

‘Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power.

Now that Medea had named my loneliness, it hung from everything, clinging like spiderwebs, unavoidable.

That was my new home: a monument to my father’s pride.

fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.

I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.

But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.