I stood in the dark for a long time after I put the phone down.
That was the honest truth of it. I had told myself I was going to review the last two pages of the restructuring timeline, just the last two, and then sleep. Instead I was standing at the window with the city spread out below me and Adrian’s name still warm on my recent calls list, and I was thinking about a moment that I had not been present for and could not stop turning over in my head.
He had laughed tonight. On the phone, recounting Ethan and the museum placard, recounting the donor wall, recounting “she has a bad face” with the helpless warmth of a man who had been completely disarmed by an eight-year-old. That laugh. I had heard it. And I had filed it very carefully in the part of myself I was still pretending was und
