He said it the way a man says he has finally gotten around to a chore, a leaky faucet, a squeaking door — a small satisfaction at a task well done.

He brushed the crumbs off the placemat the way he had brushed crumbs off a thousand placemats after a thousand ordinary dinners, with the same idle care, as though tonight were like any other night and not the night he had tried to erase his own family from the earth.

And it was that, more than the phone call, more than the rest of it, that told me who he truly was and always had been.

A man in the grip of some terrible passion, some rage, some breakdown — that man I might one day have found a way to understand.