It was the small adjustment a man makes when he is about to have a conversation that will require management, the way you brace slightly before picking up something heavier than it looks.

He had been doing it for as long as I had known him.

I had been watching him do it for thirteen years and I had never once said a word about it, because she was his mother and because the arrangement we had arrived at was that I did not comment and he did not ask me to.

Half past five in the morning.

She knew the date.