And this is the sentence I would put in front of any woman standing where I was standing, because it took me the whole of that morning to arrive at and about nine months to be able to defend.

Coming back is not a repair.

It is the minimum.

He had done the right thing in the end.

He had got in a car and come back and he had opened a door for his mother to leave through and he had agreed with every charge I put to him without once reaching for an excuse, and all of that was real and none of it was nothing.

But every piece of it was something he did after four and a half hours.