“I know,” he said, and lowered his head, and cried, and I watched him do it and felt no pleasure in it at all.

Only a great and final tiredness.

I have thought a great deal, since, about why I insisted on that one point so hard — why, of everything I could have said to Nathan in that room, I chose to press the single truth he could not escape.

It would have been easier, in a way, to let him have the exits.

His mother did move half the pieces.