People ask me about the next part more than any other part of this and they always want the same thing, which is the moment of shock, and I did have one and it was about a second long and then something much stranger happened.

I did arithmetic.

I stood at a window in Terminal 4 with a laptop open in one hand, looked at two sleeping children, and worked out that if they were five then they had been conceived in the spring of the year Evelyn left, and that the spring of the year Evelyn left was the spring I was in Portugal for three weeks, and that I had come back on the fourteenth of May to an apartment with nothing in it.

I did that arithmetic three times in about nine seconds and I got the same answer every time and I still did not move.

Part Two: Nine Minutes

I stood there for nine minutes.

I know it was nine because the delay was announced at 7:52 and I looked at my telephone at 8:03 and about two of those minutes were the walk.

Nine minutes is a very long time to stand in an airport looking at three sleeping people, and I have been asked whether I was frozen, and I was not.

I was doing something, and I have never been able to decide whether it was the best or the worst thing I did that day.

I was building a case.

It is what I do.

I have spent twenty years in a business where you do not walk into a room until you know what the room contains, and standing at that window my entire professional apparatus came online and started producing questions, in order, the way it does.

Were they hers.

Yes — the sleeping one had the same face at rest.