He asked on a Thursday evening, after Ethan was asleep and the legal work had been distributed to three separate firms and the night had settled into the particular quiet that followed days of significant effort. He said: *would you come up to the roof for a bit.* Not a question, exactly. Not a statement. Something in between, the sentence of a man who had something to say and had decided tonight was when he was going to say it.
I went.
The rooftop was Ethan’s domain now, in the way that spaces became children’s domains through the simple act of caring about them more than anyone else. His notebook was on the bench, left there from the afternoon session with the new telescope, and the telescope itself was angled at the position he had marked in the notebook as optimal for the current wee
