It is a wedding, and a honeymoon, and the birth of a son, and that son’s whole childhood and adolescence and adulthood, all of it unfolding inside a continuous, unbroken atmosphere of fear that never once lifted.

It is birthdays and holidays and anniversaries, hundreds of them, each one a performance of a happy family staged over the top of the truth.

Patricia had been afraid in that house since before I was born.

She had learned to read Arthur’s moods the way sailors read weather, to shrink and placate and disappear, to absorb and hide and endure, for longer than I had been alive — and she had done it, I understood, largely alone, because the whole architecture of her imprisonment was designed to keep her isolated, without allies, without anyone who could see.

And now, at last, in a hospital waiting room, there was someone who could see.