We spent the rest of the afternoon in an anxious kind of silence. Cricket gingerly trod through the broken shards back to the kitchen, returning with a dustpan and a mop. Wallis sat by the hole, a sentinel in stockinged feet, armed with a hammer from our late father’s toolbox. Atlas kept the kettle hot, made sure we ate finger foods, bandaged Cricket’s hand after she had a run-in with a stray piece of 150-year-old glass on her sofa.

I spent time dry heaving over the porcelain sink in the powder room, clammy, retching and feeling wretched, unable to catch my breath. This was my father, my blood. This was Senator Gregory Richardson.

My entire life, I’d taken this as fact: he was a complicated man but brilliant politician.

I’d suspected the affair, but never this.

Later, as the sun set on P Street, we patched the window with a cardboard box and duct tape.

Four

“I don’t know anything about this,” Cricket kept saying the next morning. Wallis and I sat on the couch in the parlor, embarrassed, as officials in blue windbreakers carted away papers and electronics. “You don’t know my husband.” Cricket swooped from one room to another, trailing the Feds, tidying what she could of the mess in their wake. “You don’t know him.”

After a few too many of these refrains from Cricket, Wallis pulled me into the kitchen. “The lady doth protest too much,” she said. We could hear footsteps and floor creaks directly above us, strangers searching through our parents’ bedroom.

“You think she knew,” I asked, “about the stealing?”

“How could she not?” Wallis said. “She lived with the man.”

I had wondered, in fact, about this very thing. No—wondered is the wrong word. One doesn’t spend all night, as I had, wondering about things. Wonder didn’t make me toss so violently that the corner of my fitted sheet had popped off and curled around my feet. Wonder didn’t cause me to take a scalding shower at three in the morning, or to buy a multipurpose can and bottle opener from an infomercial at dawn. Only the agony of obsessive thinking could do that. Around breakfast, as I had been preparing to meet Cricket and the Feds at P Street, I’d come to this disquieting realization: I believed my mother. Toward the end, my parents hadn’t even been speaking to each other. If I was coming by the house, I had to inform each of them separately. So it was plausible, likely, even, that Cricket hadn’t seen or known. Yes, she had known about the adultery; she had not bothered to think about the money it required.