She told me that when he came out in 2019 she saw him perhaps four times a year, and that she had told him things about my work — not documents, not numbers, but the shape of things, what we were looking at, how it was going — because he asked and because he was interested and because he had spent his whole life asking her about work and it was the only currency the two of them had ever had.

She said, and I believe her: “I never once thought of it as giving him anything.

He was a barred sixty-eight-year-old man in a rented room in Norwalk.

I thought I was letting my father have a conversation.”

And around midnight she said the sentence that I thought, at the time, was the bottom of it.

“I know what I’ve done to you.

I lied to you every day for nine years about the largest thing in my life, and I let you hold me on the twelfth of February, and I don’t have a defense for any of it, and I’m not going to build one over the next six months.