It was that he was not grieving at all, because he knew something I did not — because to him this was not the death of his daughter but a problem to be managed, and a man managing a problem keeps his tie straight.

The surface tells the truth that the words are hiding.

I did not know yet what his straight tie meant.

But some animal part of me registered it, and flinched from it, and understood, before I had a single fact to justify the understanding, that the man in front of me was not behaving like a man whose child had died — and that meant that either his heart was a thing I had never known at all, or his child had not died.

Both, as it turned out, were true.

“You’re paying her off,” I said.