I sat in a kitchen chair and read the last line four times, and what I felt was a completely physical sensation, low down, like a lift dropping — because I had understood something that had not occurred to me in seven years.

She had known.

Not that my mother had done anything.

Not in November.

But on the twenty-fourth of November, before there was any evidence of anything, my wife had sat down and written a letter to a man she was divorcing and had ended it with a warning about his mother.

She had seen it.

She had been seeing it, presumably, for years, and had never once said it to me, and I know exactly why she never said it to me, because I know what I was like about my mother.

Part Ten: The Two Days Before Christmas