The second dinner happened in August.
Diana told me about it afterward, in the measured way she told me things, which was always complete and occasionally more candid than she had clearly intended.
They had met in Seattle. Robert was at the estate for one of his regular visits and Diana was there for the week and the intersection was not accidental but also not heavily engineered. It had the quality of two people who have separately arrived at the same decision and are pretending the decision is the other person’s.
They had dinner in the city, not at the estate. A restaurant, neutral ground.
“He said he was sorry,” Diana said. “In the specific way that means he had rehearsed it and was saying it regardless of how it landed.”
“How did it land?” I said.
“Well,” she said. “It landed wel
