“You wanted to believe that,” Cormoran said, not unkindly.

“There’s a difference.”

It landed hard, because it was true, and Ellard had spent a whole sleepless night arriving at the same place from a different road.

He had wanted to be the good grandfather so badly that he had bought the story wholesale, year after year, and asked nothing, and a boy had had to whisper on a park bench before he’d finally been willing to look.

Cormoran Padgett was the right man for this, and not only because he had thirty years of investigations behind him.

He was the right man because he had known Ellard long enough to tell him the truth and old enough to know that the truth, delivered plainly, was a kindness and not a cruelty.