And that story was dissolving in front of him, in his own eyes, at his own father’s grave, and I could see the vertigo of it nearly take his legs out from under him.

He was not just learning that I had been innocent.

He was learning that he had been the instrument of an enormous cruelty, that he had thrown a pregnant wife onto a driveway over a lie he had been too proud and too eager to examine, that five children who were unmistakably his had grown up calling another life home because of a decision he’d made in ten minutes.

That is a great deal to absorb between one breath and the next, standing beside your father’s coffin.