I did not say anything.

I could not have; my throat had closed.

I simply sat there holding the letter while Arthur’s words hung in the air, and I felt the truth of what I had been, the paid actor, the hired son, laid bare in front of everyone, and some old shame rose up in me at the sound of it.

But the director was not finished, and what she said next I have carried with me ever since.

She looked at Arthur Vance with a calm that was somehow more devastating than any anger could have been, and she said, “You hired him to pretend to be a son, Mr.