I left Julian Hart crying in a corner office and I did not close the door behind me.
In the stairwell I stood on the landing between four and five with my hand on the rail and made myself hold the two possibilities separately, the way you hold two diagnoses that can't both be true.
One. Vivian Marsh had written that line in April, and had also spoken it into a telephone in July, and had spent yesterday morning performing four years of guilt in an office with one window while I sat six feet away and believed every word.
Two. Somebody else had said it. Which meant somebody else had read a piece of paper that had been couriered, unsigned, to a private house on the North Shore three months ago.
There was no third option. Those were the only two places that sentence had ever existed.
There
