He knew the photograph was nothing; he had known that in a car with Brian half an hour earlier, and probably a good deal sooner than that.

What he was looking at on those two screens was the measurement of the gap between the two things.

Two feet.

That is how far away he had been standing.

Two feet, with a cake in his hands and sparklers on it, singing, grinning at us.

And his mother had taken a photograph of his own happiness, and cut him out of it, and sent it to him as evidence against his wife.

And he had believed it for four and a half hours.