I had a hundred more urgent fears crowding my mind.

But I would remember, later, the strange careful way he said it was nothing, and I would understand that in that moment Raymond Winslow had begun, very quietly, to hope for something he had given up hoping for many long years before.

I did not see it, that morning, because I was too deep in my own fears to read his.

But I have thought about it often since, the strange cruelty and mercy tangled together in that moment.