Elke had understood something about him that I had been too much in love to see: that he was already, quietly, looking for a door out of a marriage that complicated his comfortable life, and that all she had to do was hand him a reason that let him feel wronged instead of guilty.

She did not have to convince him.

She only had to give his cowardice a costume.

That is the thing I needed him to understand, standing over his father’s grave — not that he had been deceived, but that he had been complicit in his own deception, that a braver or a kinder man would have seen through it in an hour, and that the ten lost years were not something that had merely happened to him.

They were something he had chosen, in a walnut study, in ten minutes, with the door already open.