All of it was a man arranging his life so that there was never a period longer than about ninety minutes in which he had to be alone in a room with himself.

I spoke to my mother most Sundays.

In February she told me Jessi had moved out of the area.

In May she said she had heard Jessi was “seeing somebody.” In August she said, in passing, that she had run into somebody who said Jessi looked well and seemed happy.

Every one of those was a lie and every one of them was calibrated exactly to keep a wound at a particular temperature — warm enough to hurt, cool enough that a man does not do anything drastic like get on a plane.

I never asked a single question that would have caught any of it.