He had used the deepest wound a person can carry and made it into a place to hide his crimes.

And the thing that kept coming back to me, in that chair, was not the crime itself but the tenderness that had wrapped it — because that was the part I could not get my mind around.

It would be almost bearable if he had been cold.

If he had ignored my grief, dismissed it, left me alone with it, I could have filed him under the ordinary category of men who cannot meet their wives in pain.

But he hadn’t been cold.

He had been kind. He had held my hand in those waiting rooms with what I would have sworn was real feeling.