My father was quiet.
I watched him be quiet and I thought about the marble floor and the night that had set everything in motion and the closed face and the revision of the assessment and the specific, heavy cost of understanding that the thing you had turned away from had not gone away but had simply gone underground and had been there all along, building in the dark with the patience of something that had nowhere else to go.
"He blames me," my father said.
"Yes," I said.
"He is correct to blame me," my father said.
The sentence landed in the morning air with the flat, specific weight of a thing said by a man who had arrived at it through a process that had cost him considerably and was not going to elaborate on the cost because elaboration was not available to him and I did not requ
