By family, I’d meant telling my parents I was gay twenty years later than I should have and still becoming estranged from my father because of it. By old friends, I’d meant misery, regret, fantasy, and depression. By work, I’d meant volunteering for a dangerous two-year drug task force upstate to curtail the opioid and meth epidemic already happening by 2010, 2011. The more risky the assignment, the more precarious the situation, the faster my hand would go up. I didn’t tell Archie any of that, or how close I’d come to not being there when he returned.
“I’m still glad you came back,” I said, recalling Leslie and Beckham’s first child in my arms just about a year after the wedding. Little BJ—Beckham Justice, not junior—was already five, ready to start kindergarten in September. They’d had
