“And I believed you.”

“That’s not your fault. I lied to you every single week.”

“Samantha.” He said it in a voice I have heard perhaps four times. “I need you to let me finish, because I have been not-finishing this conversation for five years.

“I believed you because it was easier. That’s the part. Not because you were convincing — you weren’t, particularly, and I’d been reading people professionally for two decades.

I believed you because I was about to go out for a hundred and forty days and I could not go out on that ship with a bad feeling about my daughter.

“So I decided you were fine. It took about four seconds and I did it in a stairwell on a base in Norfolk, and then I went to sea, and I did it again in September, and again the following spring.”