And then on a Saturday afternoon at Pine Crest Manor I came within three minutes of breaking it in front of sixty-one people, and the only reason I didn’t is that the four-year-old had turned into a nine-year-old and decided to speak.

That is the ground Pamela Gable walked onto.

A competent, exhausted, badly lonely man with a well-run household and a quiet daughter and a dead wife whose photographs were on the refrigerator.

She did not have to be a mastermind.

She only had to be paying attention.

Part Three: The Two Good Years