Love shows up in small ceaseless questions.

Are you warm enough.

Did you sleep.

Does it hurt today.

Julian and Victoria asked their father none of these things.

Their questions, when they had any, were about documents and signatures and dates, and they asked them of his lawyers and his accountants, not of him.

To them he had already, in some essential way, died; what remained was merely the paperwork of a death not yet official.

I found it obscene, and I could not hide that I found it obscene, and I think it was precisely because I could not hide it that Arthur began, slowly, to see in me something he had stopped believing he would ever find under his own roof.