My father had done that, I realized, on a scale I had not imagined.

He had not only kept a secret from us for ten years; he had, in some real way, kept it from himself, buried it so deep that the very photograph of his own involvement felt to him like a picture of a stranger.

And the fear I saw rising in him now was the fear of a man watching that pavement crack, watching the buried thing begin, at last, to push its way back up into the light where he would finally have to look at it.

“Try, Dad,” I said, more gently now.