But the camera left no room.

It showed exactly what had happened, plainly, without interpretation, and there was no story Julian could tell himself over the top of it that would survive contact with the image.

That, I think, is why he only watched it once.

He did not need to see it twice.

Once was enough to burn away, permanently, every comforting fiction he had spent forty years constructing about the man who raised him.

Some truths can only be fully believed when they cannot be looked away from, and the camera made this one impossible to look away from.