That was the horror of it.

It cost him nothing.

He kissed my cheek and adjusted my necklace and laughed with my uncle and knelt to fix a bow on Lily’s dress, and all of it was smooth and warm and easy, and none of it was real, and the two facts sat inside him side by side without the slightest friction.

He was not a good man straining to seem bad, or even a bad man straining to seem good.

He was a man for whom the performance and the truth had never been connected in the first place — for whom warmth was a costume he could put on over anything, or nothing, at will.