The Face He Finally Saw
I was not from anywhere that mattered to them; I had gone to a state school on an ROTC scholarship; I had a career of my own that I would not give up, which they found first amusing and then, as it became clear I meant it, threatening.
For eight years I absorbed the small cruelties of that house the way you absorb weather.
And then, in the ninth year, the accusation came — an affair, they said, with a rival of Rhett’s, evidence and all — and Rhett, who I had stood beside through the hardest stretch of his early career, who I had believed knew me down to the bone, looked at the evidence someone handed him and did not look at me.
Ten minutes.