"Look, I get it," Elliot says abruptly, tone a sliver more neutral. "When my dad died I left during his funeral, because even as a kid that made me mad." A lot of things about his dad's death made him angry, at the time, though he remembers it through the cotton gauze filter of time that dulls violent emotions down to something intellectual: thinking, I was angry, rather than reexperiencing that anger again. If it still evokes rage, it's too carefully partitioned away for Elliot to feel it.