The late nights.
The new colleague who came up too often in conversation.
They had seen all of it and chosen the comfortable interpretation, because Carys was the kind of woman they wished their son had married, and because the alternative — that their son was a liar cheating on the wife who had nursed him back to health — was not a story they wanted to be in.
So they had looked away, the way they had looked away from my career for six years, the way this family looked away from every inconvenient truth as a matter of habit.
And now the looking-away had nearly cost them their son, because if any of them had been willing to ask a single honest question in the preceding months, someone might have seen Carys Renton coming.
Their whole way of being in the world — preferring the flattering story, disdaining the plain one, never asking what they did not want to know — had led them straight to this corridor at three in the morning, forcing papers on the one person who had bothered to keep her eyes open.