He told the truth eventually, all of it, badly, over four hours at my kitchen table with no one else present. Then he told Delphine, which took him nine days to work up to and which she made him do to her face.
He repaid her in full from the sale of the building. We separated for fourteen months and we are in our second year of counselling now, which nobody in this family expected, least of all me. Imogen still does not speak to him. Tobias does. I have stopped refereeing either decision.
The new recliner went to a charity shop. He sits on the sofa now, in the open, where I can see him, and I am aware of how that sounds and I do not care.
Twenty seven years I had sat in a room with a man and never once thought to look underneath. The lesson was not that people hide things. It was that I had trained myself not to notice, and I will never be that comfortably unobservant in my own life again.
