We believed that two hundred and eleven people had received an invitation and that somebody had gone down a list and taken one name off it.

Not a committee vote.

Neither of us thought that.

What we pictured — and I know exactly what I pictured, because I pictured it about four hundred times between September and November — was one person, at a kitchen table, going through a list, arriving at a name, and pausing.

That was the whole of it.

A pause at a kitchen table.

It is a very specific kind of injury and I do not think you can understand it unless you have watched a child be excluded, which is a different thing from being disliked and a much worse one.