Nathan arrived on a Friday evening with takeout from the Thai place on 84th Street and a bottle of wine he set on my kitchen counter without ceremony, the way he had been arriving at various versions of my kitchen for seven years, in Edinburgh and briefly in Boston and now here, with the same ease and the same complete lack of announcement that I had come to understand was simply how Nathan Cross moved through the world. He did not perform arrival. He was simply there.
Ethan had been delighted, as he always was, and was now asleep, and the takeout containers were mostly empty between us on the coffee table, and Nathan had his wine and I had mine and the city was doing its nighttime thing outside the window, and it was a Friday evening exactly like other Friday evenings.
Except that Natha
