The fourth thing I thought, and the one that came closest, was that there was somebody in my wife’s family who I had been kept away from.

A brother nobody mentioned.

A relative in some kind of trouble.

There is one in a great many families and there was, as far as I knew, not one in Antonia’s.

What I did not think, at any point in two hours and eleven minutes in a cold garage, was the truth.

It was not available to me.

It could not have been, because it required a piece of information that I did not have and that four people had been keeping from me for the entire nine years of my marriage.

At ten past ten, I heard the guest cottage door.