"I must have done something"

Once the reading has arrived, the search begins. What did I do? You go back through the day, and then the week, looking for the offence, and you find it. The thing about the bins. The joke on Saturday that might have landed wrong. The plan.

Notice how the search works. It starts from the conclusion and looks for a cause, and it always finds one, because a week always contains something. There is no week in which you did nothing that could be read as an offence by someone looking for one. The search isn't discovering that you caused the mood. It's producing a candidate for a role that's already been cast, and the candidate is whatever's nearest.

Fenigstein's students did a version of this. Told a paper had been singled out, they didn't think "which of us might that be", they thought "mine", and then presumably remembered the question they weren't sure about. The certainty came first and the reason after. In the search, the reason always looks like the cause because it was found in the light of the conclusion.

There's a plainer way to see it. Your partner has, on the evidence of Story and Repetti and of ordinary life, not thought about the bins since the moment you mentioned them this morning. It was a sentence about bins. It went where sentences about bins go. The thing you found in the search, the offence that explains the quiet, has been living in your head all day and nowhere else. You're the only person in the house who remembers it, and you're using it to explain the behaviour of the other person, who doesn't.

I'm not saying you never cause a mood. Chapter 24 is about the times you do. I'm saying that the search can't tell you when, because it finds an offence every time, and a test that comes back positive every time isn't a test. If you want to know whether you did something, the search won't tell you. The check will, and that's chapter 20.