I said, “Robert.

I made a disclosure to my agency eight days ago.

It is already not in the family.

It stopped being in the family at ten past eight in the morning on the sixteenth of September, which was about forty hours after I found out.”

And he went very quiet.

And then he said the thing that ended it, and I do not think he heard himself say it, and I have never been able to decide whether that makes it better or worse.