It was calculation — a quick, cold reassessment, the look of a man who has just learned a variable he did not account for and is running the new numbers.

In that half-second I understood that everything I had ever taken for his warmth had been a surface, laid down with great skill over that machine, and that the surface was now failing in real time because an eleven-year-old had supplied a detail no innocent man’s stepson could have invented.

Then he smoothed it over and reached again for the wounded, patient voice.

But it was too late.