Some of the extended family were appalled, not at Arthur, but at us.

We were overreacting, they said.

We were destroying the family over one mistake.

An aunt telephoned Julian to scold him for dragging his father’s good name through the mud.

Julian listened to about a minute of it, and then he blocked her number, and he did it without anger, having finally understood a thing it had taken him his whole life to learn: that if protecting your child destroys the illusion of a happy family, then the family was only ever an illusion, and the child was always worth more than the illusion.

That was the lesson the extended family could not accept, and it is, I have come to believe, the most important thing this whole terrible episode taught us.