A lesser father would have raged, and I would have had to manage his rage on top of everything else.

My father held it — I could see the cost of holding it in the vein at his temple and the set of his jaw — because he knew, with thirty years of hard-won knowledge, that rage spent in the courtyard was rage that would not be available for the work.

He was already, in that silence, converting what he felt into what he would do.

It was the most frightening and the most reassuring thing I had ever watched, and it told me, before he said a single word, that the people who had done this had made a mistake they could not begin to comprehend.

“Craig did this,” he said.

Not a question either.