He reached for containment.

He reached for the name.

His deepest, fastest, most honest instinct, when the truth could no longer be denied, was to ask me to help him hide it — which is, of course, the exact family instinct that had protected Arthur for thirty years, surfacing in the son as naturally as breathing.

David was not a monster.

That was almost the saddest part.

He was something more ordinary and more disappointing: a decent-enough man so thoroughly shaped by a family that valued its image above all things that even now, even here, with his father in handcuffs and his wife’s two years of fear finally proven true, the machine in him reached for the cover-up before it reached for me.