This.

He had been caught eight hours earlier, standing in a doorway with his belt undone, and he was in my bedroom at one o’clock in the morning still running the arithmetic on what he could get away with.

“Get your bag,” I said.

He got his bag.

At the top of the stairs he turned around and said, “Where do you want me to say I’m going, if the kids ask?”

And that was the first time all day I nearly hit him.