That is the one she had been running on her son for thirty-eight years and on me for eleven, and I had never once seen it done so fast or so nakedly as I saw it done that morning.

You produce a thing.

The thing is shown to be nothing.

You do not retreat and you do not apologise.

You simply treat the demolition of your evidence as an irrelevance and ask your opponent to account for herself on a new charge.

And the awful thing about it — the reason it works, the reason it had worked for decades in that family — is that it is extremely difficult not to answer.

The pull to say there’s nothing wrong with the way I’m looking at Brian is almost physical.