He counted backward and arrived at the truth his mother had spent four years burying: this child had been conceived inside his marriage, before the photograph, before the expulsion, before any of it.

There had been no rich lover.

There had been a pregnant wife, standing in a kitchen with her hands over her stomach, saying I’m pregnant, Desmond, please let me explain, and he had told her to pack her bags.

He had thrown his own unborn daughter out into a February dawn.

That little girl standing on a dictionary to reach a table, tearing a bread roll in half — she was the child he had abandoned before she drew a breath, the child who had been somewhere in the world for four years growing his eyes and his nose and his dimple while he sat alone in a dark house drinking and calling himself the wronged man.

The floor of his life did not so much crack as simply cease to exist.