It had also left him with a defect he had never examined: when someone told him that a quiet person had a hidden agenda, some part of him found it plausible on principle.

He began to re-read his own household.

The triangles of toast were no longer a kindness.

They were leverage — a woman making herself indispensable in a way a father could not compete with.

The running down the hall was no longer joy.

It was evidence of an allegiance that had been cultivated.

The quietness — the thing he had valued most for five years — became the most suspicious quality of all. Those quiet ones are the dangerous ones, Sabina had said, and he had laughed at the time, and the sentence had gone in anyway and stayed.

By the last week of February, he had stopped being able to watch Rosamund cut fruit without wondering what she wanted.