Arthur got out in the second year.

I found out the way you find out things like that, which is a form letter from a victim notification service that arrives on a Tuesday and sits on the hall table for two days before anyone opens it.

He served fourteen months of a longer sentence and he has been out for two and a half years and in that time he has not contacted a single person in this family.

Not me, which is expected and correct and covered by an order anyway. Not Colin. Not Brenda, who checked. Not Lia.

He does not live with Martha. That surprised me more than anything else about the whole business — forty-one years of marriage and he came out and went to Fenwick, which is ninety minutes north, and rents a room, and works, according to something Brenda heard from a cousin, at a tyre place.

Colin drove up there once. He told me afterward, at the kitchen table, in about four sentences.