He was being efficient.

The dying of our son was, to him, not a horror to be endured but a logistical condition to be exploited, a period of my guaranteed distraction, a favorable environment for fraud.

He felt, I have come to believe, essentially nothing about Leo’s death at all — nothing but the recognition of an opportunity it created.

And that emptiness, that total absence of the feeling any human being ought to have had, is more frightening to me than any cruelty could be.

Cruelty is at least a relationship.

Julian did not hate our son enough to time his theft to Leo’s death.