The emergencies that arrived every year with such convenient timing, always just as the last one resolved — he had told himself that was simply how it went for a young widower raising a child alone.

The way Radley had grown colder and less grateful as the years passed, when gratitude should have deepened — he had told himself that was the calcifying effect of hard years.

Every one of those explanations had been available to him, and he had reached for every one, because the alternative was to suspect the father of his only grandson, and to suspect that man was to risk losing access to the boy, and losing the boy was the one thing Ellard could not survive.

So he had paid, and asked nothing, and called his silence generosity.

Lying in the dark, he saw it for what it had actually been: fear, wearing the costume of love.

He had been so afraid of losing the last piece of Sidonie that he had made himself deliberately, elaborately blind, and a grown man’s blindness has a cost, and Ellard did not yet know how high the cost had run, only that it was going to be higher than he could bear.