“He cornered me too,” she said, and the room went still.

“When I was seventeen.

A friend of mine, at one of Dad’s school events.

She told me what he’d said to her and I — I told her she must have misunderstood.

Because that’s what we do in this family.

That’s what they taught me to do.” She looked at her father with something that was past hatred, out the other side into a kind of grief.

“I’ve spent my whole life helping you hide, and I didn’t even let myself know that’s what I was doing.” And I understood that Arthur had just lost the one witness he had always been able to count on: his own daughter’s willingness not to see.