You knew on day two with nothing to go on but a dress and a schedule, and you were right, and the reason it feels like failure is that you’re measuring it against a version of yourself who could have known in year eight, and that woman doesn’t exist.

Nobody knows in year eight.

That’s the entire point of what he was doing.”

Nathan’s defense was, in the end, three propositions.

The first was that Margaret Collins had never accepted her daughter’s marriage.

There was testimony to this from Nathan’s mother and from one of the men in good suits.