It was the fear of a man who has just watched the machinery he relied on stop working in front of witnesses.

For eight years the arrangement had run on a single hidden assumption — that no matter what was asked of me, no matter how the ledger tilted, I would absorb it, and stay quiet, and keep the surface smooth.

That assumption was the load-bearing wall of his entire comfortable life, and he had never once had to think about it, the way you never think about the wall until the day it cracks.

What crossed his face in that community-center room was the sound of the crack.