Madden finished his record.
It was a Wednesday in October when he called Kade and said he wanted to bring something to the house.
He came that evening with Eloise, which suggested this was significant, and he put a manuscript on the kitchen table. Printed, bound with a clip, three hundred and twelve pages of the kind of dense, precise language that I recognized as Madden's.
He looked at Kade. He looked at me.
"Read it," he said. "Both of you. All of it."
He and Eloise had dinner with us and left at nine.
Kade and I took the manuscript to the living room and divided it. He took the first hundred and fifty pages. I took the second. We read until midnight.
At midnight we swapped.
We finished at two in the morning.
We sat in the quiet of the house.
It was remarkable. Not because it w
