Richard did not ask what it was.

That, in the end, was the thing that condemned him more completely than anything my mother would say.

He did not ask, what is that? He did not ask, is my mother-in-law going to be all right? He did not look at my mother with a single ounce of worry.

He stared at that screen the way a man stares at an overdue debt he thought he had escaped, at a piece of evidence he thought he had destroyed, at a thing that was supposed to have stayed buried forever and had not.

“Turn that off,” he said.

The doctor did not move.