It was a laminated fact, issued by an institution, with my name and my title printed on it, and it meant that every dinner where this family had condescended to the poor little clerk their son had generously married, every joke about my small-town mother, every time they had waved me toward the kitchen to serve the men their food — all of it had been built on a story their son invented and they were only too glad to believe.

The badge did not just expose Roland.

It exposed them.

It told Malcolm that his family’s entire sense of its own superiority over me had been a fiction his son fed them because he could not bear the truth, and that they had eaten it eagerly for eight years because it flattered them to.

I saw the man begin, in real time, to understand that.

And I did not help him.