I sat with the specific, complicated truth of it, the thing that was not defensible and was also not incomprehensible, the thing that lived in the territory between those two places where most human decisions actually lived, where the understandable and the unacceptable existed simultaneously and required you to hold both without resolving them into something simpler.
"Your father looked back," I said.
He went still.
"He told Matteo that the night of the marble floor was a failure he had not permitted himself and had permitted anyway," I said. "He said he removed you from consideration because you were inconvenient and that he has been revising this assessment." I paused. "Those were not small things for a man like him to say."
Liam looked at the table.
Something moved in his face tha
