And then I stopped thinking about it and just sat in the garden in the afternoon light and let it be what it was — complicated and real and entirely mine.
Sebastian came through the garden gate at five thirty.
Not the front door — the garden gate on the south side, which meant he had parked in the drive and walked around specifically to come through the garden. To find me where I had said I would be.
He came and sat beside me on the bench without speaking.
We sat together in the late afternoon light — the garden around us, the wisteria on the wall, the Pacific somewhere beyond the Atherton rooftops doing its permanent indifferent thing.
“He cried,” Sebastian said eventually.
I turned to look at him.
“My father,” he said. “At the end. When I was leaving.” He looked at the garden. “I
