He was not managing guilt.

He simply did not have any.

He had built, over eighteen months, a private version of reality in which he had done nothing that required guarding against, in which his affair was a reasonable response to a dead marriage and my hurt was merely an inconvenience to be scheduled around, and inside that reality he was genuinely, restfully comfortable, because within it he was not a man betraying his family but a man solving a problem.

That is what his ease revealed, over the pastries and the block tower: not a good actor, but a man who had stopped needing to act, because he had talked himself all the way out of believing there was anything to hide.