It had been years since he’d been that, and would never be it again, but from that day on, he became dependent on her nostalgia, on the fantasy she clung to that he had needed protecting because he hadn’t done anything wrong, that she knew he hadn’t, that he couldn’t have, because he had never spoken of it and because he always told her everything. She found out from the police, and so was able to muster the shock and righteous rage that someone should have slandered her darling boy.

Don’t ever let me hear it from your mouth.

He toughened up that night, matured overnight. He never had told Amanda what really happened. He never had to. She knew he was guilty. Why else had she put his jacket in the dryer and escorted him to the shower? Why had she helped him scrub his fingernails and throw his clothes in the wash? Why else had she lied for him?

‘Oh no, officer, that cannot be because, you see, at 10.30 p.m. my boy came home and for the rest of the evening he was here, watching TV, keeping his mother company.’

What he had done, the thing that from now on they would both be forced to wipe from their minds, that had given her a power over him. From then on, he knew that he would always be in her debt and that at any time she could call it in. The truth would undo him and they both knew it. For the past two decades she has chosen to keep the secret, but never for a moment has he doubted the possibility that this might, without warning, one day change. All it would take would be a cross word, a wrong move, a slippage in his attentiveness towards her. For twenty years he has been living in the shadow of what she did for him that night. For twenty years he has known too that she did it not to save him so much as to redeem herself. She was not a woman who had birthed a monster. She was the mother of a mathematical prodigy who, out of envy, two spiteful girls had tried and failed to bring down.

He parks his gloominess in the driveway, puts the bottle back among the bills in the glove compartment and walks to the front door of the house he cannot afford. Veronica is in the kitchen with her earbuds in, humming along to music. On the kitchen island is laid out an assortment of plates. There is a smell of roasting meat.

Cullen stares at the kitchen table, laid for six, two bottles of red wine already uncorked and airing. His heart sinks. He’d forgotten. Right now, feeling as inexplicably fragile as he does, he needs a dinner party about as much as a dose of the clap.