Raymond turned his gaze slowly up to the ceiling and lay there, staring at nothing, for a long moment, and something was working behind his eyes, some calculation I could not follow, a stillness that was not the stillness of a mind gone blank but of a mind working very hard behind a carefully composed face.

“What is it?” I asked him.

“What are you thinking?”

“It is nothing,” he said.

But his voice, when he said it, was not the voice of a man for whom it was nothing.

It was the voice of a man who had just fitted one small piece into a picture I could not yet see, and did not quite dare, yet, to say aloud what the whole picture might turn out to be.

I let it go, that morning.