I thought he was tracking the movements of his enemy.

It was only later that I grasped what he had already worked out, that Christopher’s panic could mean only one thing, that the test had come back showing not a stranger’s child but a relation, and that Christopher, faced with the existence of a true heir, had run straight to the one man who could help him make the problem disappear faster.

Raymond had lain paralyzed in that bed for weeks, but his mind had never stopped working, and it was working now, faster than mine, assembling from each small fact I brought him a picture I could not yet see.

He was, I would come to understand, always several steps ahead of me in reading his own family, because he had spent a lifetime learning, at great cost, what they were.