Seven months.

Two hundred-odd evenings.

He would sit in that study after dinner with the door open, and I would go past and say goodnight, and he would say goodnight.

And what I could not survive was the arithmetic: how did I not know.

What I have arrived at, and it took two years, is that the question is wrong.

It assumes that a person doing something monstrous emits a signal.

That there is a way of looking at a man across a dinner table and detecting it.