Retrospect has exquisite handwriting and rather questionable accounts. A glance, a pause, an invitation that never arrived: how neatly these little vacancies arrange themselves, years later, into evidence. The dots were scattered; the line connecting them is suspiciously fresh. What was merely unpleasant becomes deliberate; what was deliberate must, naturally, have been planned from the beginning. Even coincidence is brought in for questioning and emerges, after a long night, prepared to cooperate.
Fear, an industrious little barrister, understands this perfectly. It seldom invents every detail. It selects, arranges, supplies the missing connective tissue, and leaves the resulting creature on the table with an air of having merely discovered it.
Yet an interpretation, however elegant, remains an interpretation. Between the two lies a modest stretch of unlit road along which suspicion is forever offering complimentary transport. Nor does uncertainty require hospitality. A door may remain closed without the person outside being declared a burglar.
