Memory is exactly the place where the truth is least safe, because memory belongs to the person doing the remembering, and the people doing the remembering, in my family, had already shown they would remember whatever let them sleep.

A photograph does not want to sleep.

It does not need the evening to have gone a particular way.

It simply holds the two unused place settings in the light exactly as they were, and lets anyone who is brave enough look at them later and see what the evening actually contained, which was an absence that several people would, within the week, be insisting had never happened.

Chapter 13 — When Did They Start Talking to You Like a Bill Collector