‘I can’t be thrown away again. I don’t know why people find it so easy to throw me away.’ He blurted that out, feeling the horrible childishness of it: the bewildered realisation that his mother cared only for his father, and his father for nobody at all. ‘My parents, and everyone I thought was my friend, and Martin, and then you – no, let me finish. I can’t keep only mattering when other people care, because they always stop caring. I can’t be disposable all my life.’
