I managed a weak smile.

“Dad, none of this makes sense.

Should I get the doctor?”

I want to describe what those words do to a person, because until that night I would not have believed a sentence could physically rearrange a room. Everything you believe is false. A whole life is a structure built on a foundation of settled facts — my mother died when I was four; my father raised me alone; these are the load-bearing walls, the things so certain you never think to check them, because to check them would be like checking whether the floor is really there.

And Clement, with four words, had just told me the floor was not there.

I felt the vertigo of it in my body before my mind could even argue.