And then there was the question that the whole thing had actually been about, which nobody in that family had thought about for a single second in the middle of all of it.

Two babies.

Christopher did not enter the room they were in for six days.

That is Evelyn’s account, given to me two years later, and she gave it flatly and did not excuse it.

On the sixth day she went to his room in the house in Paradise Valley and told him that if he walked away from those children because of what adults had done, he would be a smaller man than she had raised, and that she would say so publicly for as long as she lived.

He has, in the four years since, been present.