I did not yet know the half of what he had heard.

But I knew, from that single blink, that something in that house was very wrong.

I think that single blink changed me more than anything else that whole night.

Up to that point, I could still have told myself a comfortable story, that Raymond was mostly gone, that whatever he heard washed over a dimmed and fading mind, that his family’s coldness, however ugly, was at least not being witnessed by the man it concerned.

That blink took the comfortable story away.