What he is, is consistent. Seven years, no contest, no contact, no lawyer, no press, no appeal, one package a year, sent to a gate he knows he cannot enter.

I have been trying to build a case out of that for four months and it will not build in either direction.

I drove to Chattanooga in February. Alone, in my own car, having told no one, which took some arranging in a life like mine and which I managed by telling Grant’s people I was at the Nashville office.

I did not go to speak to him. I want that clear, including to myself, because I have interrogated it since and I believe it.

I went because my daughter was going to ask a magistrate to let her see a man, and I had a picture of that man in my head from seven years ago — a man in a four-thousand-dollar suit ordering security guards to take a child back into a house — and I did not trust the picture anymore and I did not trust anyone else to update it for me.

I parked across from the hardware store at 4:40 in the afternoon and waited fifty minutes.