And Fernando Vance sat in a chair in a room in San Jeronimo and did not answer for about twenty seconds and then said:

“I wasn’t going to go.”

“You weren’t going to go.”

“Mom was going to go.

I was going to stay at the house.”

That is the answer and it is the whole of the man.

He had, at that point, spent four minutes telling me that he had been deceived by his mother into believing his daughter was dead — and when asked a question about Thursday morning that only makes sense if he knew she was not, he answered it.

He did not notice.