“But you were already lying to her before you left.” I reached him and put my hand on his shoulder, meaning to take him out of there, meaning to end it — but he wasn’t finished, and I understood, feeling the set of his shoulders under my hand, that he needed to finish.

“You told me you never lie,” he said, looking straight at his father.

“That wasn’t true either.”

Under my hand I could feel him trembling — a fine, deep tremor that his voice did not carry at all.

That was the thing that broke something open in me, standing behind him: that he was terrified, had been terrified the whole time, and was doing it anyway.

People would say afterward that he had been so composed, so eerily calm, and they were wrong.