The announcement came over the intercom. I didn’t think twice about it.

Then the plane lurched.

Far more than the mild turbulence the captain had warned about when he turned on the seatbelt sign and asked everyone to remain seated.

I checked my seatbelt.

Still secure. Of course it was. I hadn’t moved since takeoff.

Another drop.

That one was significant. The kind where your stomach lifts before the rest of you remembers gravity. A few people gasped. Somewhere behind us a plastic cup hit the floor and rolled, tapping its way down the aisle. I reminded myself that planes hardly ever crash, that the odds of mine going down were astronomical.

“Is this normal?”

The question came from the old woman sitting beside me – seventy, maybe eighty. She had talked to me a bit when we were first seated. This was only her third flight, she said. The other two had been when she was much younger.

“I wouldn’t say normal,” I said. “But nothing to worry about.”

The worst jolt yet. Two overhead compartments flung open.

I’d never seen that before.

I looked over at the woman, ostensibly to make sure her seatbelt was secure. When our eyes met, I saw they were tearing.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said, as reassuringly as I could.

She took my hand.

Her fingers were colder than I expected, the skin thin in the way that comes with age. I wondered whether she’d even realized she had done it, or if instinct had simply reached for the nearest human being.

When the plane dropped again a moment later, she squeezed with more force than I would have imagined a woman her age could muster.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said again. “I promise.”

I wasn’t sure it would be.

It wasn’t the first time I had lied to her, though.

We had only spoken briefly. I had listened with a smile as she told me she was from the suburbs of Chicago, our point of departure, and was flying to New York for a grandson’s bar mitzvah. I nodded as if interested when she added that when she was married, her husband insisted on driving to see their daughter, even though it was a fourteen-hour trip. He was the kind of man who valued money over time, she said, and then mentioned that he had been gone for four years in a way that made it clear she still missed him.

I told her I lived in Manhattan and had been in Chicago for a conference, explaining I was a professor at Columbia. When I switched my phone to airplane mode, she saw the screensaver and asked about my family. I pointed to the picture, indicating which of my daughters was Sophie and which was Hannah. I told her the photo had been taken last year, that they were three and seven now, and that the woman between them was my wife, Rachel.

“You are truly blessed,” she said with a smile.

“I am,” I said.

That was the first lie I told her.

The plane leveled out. The woman released me from her death grip and laughed the nervous way people do when they realize they had been foolish for imagining the worst.

“You were very brave,” she said.

“I was scared too, believe me,” I said.

It was the third lie I told her.

I wasn’t frightened at all. Not because I’m brave. Or even because I had faith in the pilot’s ability to get us safely on the ground.

For the opposite reason.

The thought of landing—of taking a taxi back to my apartment, of seeing Rachel and my children, of having to go back to my life—made me hope the plane crashed.

I was delayed getting a taxi because of a phone call. I’d thought it would be quick, just the perfunctory – I’m back, safe and sound. Instead, it lasted nearly an hour. By the time I got home, Rachel told me the girls were already asleep.

“I tried to keep them up for you,” she said.

I blamed traffic from JFK. Rachel nodded as if that made sense.

Over cold pizza, I told her about the conference. She listened the way spouses do when the details of a job interest them only insofar as the job continues to exist.

I didn’t tell her about the flight home.

We watched television. Before I left, we’d been binging a cop show on Hulu and had left off on a cliffhanger.

“It took all my willpower not to watch without you,” Rachel said.

“You could have,” I said.

“I know.”

Sometimes we talk like that.

In bed, we had sex.

“Maybe we shouldn’t let so much time pass before we do it again,” Rachel said.

“Yeah, that sounds like a good idea,” I replied.

“I mean, I really like it.”

“Sex is good,” I said, like a caveman.

She gave me her Why are you such an asshole all the time look.

I said I was sorry.

The better answer would have been that I didn’t really know.

I saw Allison the next morning in the History department office, which is little more than a copy machine beside a table. The faculty all have their own offices, so there’s rarely a reason to be there—except that someone makes coffee in the morning.

And because Allison is there.

“Professor Ellis,” she said with a nod when I walked in.

She already had a cup of coffee, though she was still standing, which meant she had poured it recently. We were alone, but that didn’t necessarily mean our admin wasn’t somewhere nearby.

That wasn’t why Allison used my title, though. She sometimes does that even when we’re alone.

“Professor Walling,” I said.

Allison studies fascism, which has made her a minor television presence lately—timely expertise, and the fact that men prefer their moral lessons delivered by a beautiful woman.

My field is intellectual history. It sits somewhere between philosophy and history—the ideas themselves and the world that produced them. My work focuses on competing notions of morality: whether right and wrong are grounded in reason or something less tidy.

Yes, I’m aware of the irony.

“As much as I’d love to chat, Professor Ellis,” she said. “Duty calls.”

She looks at me. Her eyes asking if we’re still on for later.

Yes, I tell her with mine. A thousand times, yes.

It’s been going on for seven months. Allison and I meet once or twice a week in the cheapest hotel in Morningside Heights. There, we have sex. Talk intimately about our lives. Have more sex. Say goodbye.

Sometimes, in between the sex or in the time we’re clothed, we talk about a life in which we can be together. I don’t think either of us believe that will ever come to pass, though. If we did, we’d talk it about more seriously. Now it has the wistful tenor of imagining hitting the lotto.

Allison is married too. She has a son roughly between Sophie and Hannah in age.

When we began our affair, she said that she liked that I was married with children.

“Isn’t that the first rule?” she said. “Don’t cheat with anyone who has less to lose than you do?”

My first class that morning was my least favorite. An introductory seminar. One week—three hours of lecture—for each thinker.

“Good morning, one and all,” I said, as if I were a ringmaster. “Today we discuss the man who Immanuel Kant said woke him from a long slumber, so you know it’s going to be good. Anyone who did the reading and thinks they understood it want to explain David Hume’s idea that reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions?”

No volunteers.

Then a reluctant hand rose from the middle. The same boy who usually started things.

“I think he means that what we know—or think we know—is only what we’ve experienced,” he said. “Not just what people tell us is true.”

“Not very encouraging for college professors who have devoted their lives to telling people things, now is it?”

Polite laughter. The kind people offer when the boss tells a joke. Or your father-in-law.

“But you’re right,” I said. “Anyone want to take a stab as to what it is about that concept that Kant found so revolutionary?”

The boy shook his head, indicating that he had done his part. No one else volunteered.

“As we discussed last week, Kant believed there was nothing higher than reason. From that, he constructed a system that could tell you what actions were right and wrong. Lying—wrong. Murder—also wrong. Always. No exceptions. It was a system of morality that was very easy to follow, even if it sometimes led to outcomes that seemed . . . well, not very moral at all.

“And then along comes David Hume who says, Actually, you’ve got it all backwards there Immanuel. The world isn’t black and white. It’s gray. Morality doesn’t come from reason. It comes from context. Or put another way, Hume is saying that nothing – even murder -- deserves praise or condemnation in and of itself. It’s why you did it that matters.”

A few of them nodded, the way students do when an idea sounds important even if they’re not entirely sure they understand it yet. I was about to explain it in their language.

“Show of hands, who’s had fajitas in a Mexican restaurant?”

Every hand was in the air.

“Think back to the first time. The waiter comes over with this sizzling concoction, the smoke billowing up. He places it before you and says . . . don’t touch the plate, it’s very hot.” I take a beat. “What did you do?”

A boy shouts out the punchline – “touch the plate.”

The kids laugh.

“Of course you do. It’s what we all do – once. And we do it because the fact that someone tells us it’s hot isn’t enough to convince us. So, we touch it, and it burns. But – here’s the thing, we don’t still do that – touch the fajita plate, I mean. And that’s because after that first time, experience guides reason.”

The students were clacking away at their keyboards. The college professor equivalent of applause.

This was a philosophy late teenagers could get behind.

Their professor, of course, should have already learned that lesson.

I didn’t have a second class that day. My upper-level seminar meets only Wednesdays and Thursdays. But Allison had a noon class, which meant our rendezvous had to wait until one.

As a result, I always went to the hotel first. Paid the man in cash and then texted Allison the room number.

That was my plan that day too, until I got an email from my department chair asking that I stop by. Lily – Professor Weitzner to the students -- always liked to get a debrief after she sent one of us to a conference.

Her office door was ajar. In her guest chair was a man about my age, with a completely bald head and a goatee. The fact he was in a suit and tie told me that he wasn’t an academic because we don’t dress like that unless it’s to go to a wedding or a funeral.

Something was not right.

“This is Elliot Hunter, he’s with the University’s general counsel office,” Lily said.

He didn’t stand to shake my hand. Just nodded once and looked down at a folder on Lily’s desk. Not a thick one, but thick enough to suggest preparation.

In the next thirty or so minutes I lied.

Repeatedly.

Allison and I were colleagues, nothing more, I said.

No, I had never been in a sexual relationship with her.

No, I had never been in any relationship with her that I would consider inappropriate.

No, I had never engaged in an inappropriate relationship with anyone in the workplace.

He nodded as if he believed me, although I knew enough to know that he didn’t.

When I was done with a version of reality that bore no resemblance to my life, Hunter said, “And so there’s absolutely no misunderstanding,” he continued, “Professor Walling is your subordinate. Therefore, if you were engaged in a relationship with her, it would be a violation of the code of conduct and would necessarily result in consequences, up to and including termination.”

I was tempted to tell him that I didn’t consider Allison my subordinate. We weren’t a business in which people reported to each other. I didn’t consider Lily my boss, even though she might have. To me, bosses can hire or fire someone. Give them raises. Or the good assignments. Or even okay their pet projects. I didn’t have that kind of authority.

Needless to say, I didn’t mention any of that.

Nor did I remind him I had tenure.

That was actually the problem, I knew. As a tenured faculty, the one power I had over Allison was that I voted on her tenure application. I was one of twenty-seven votes, and I was the most junior tenured faculty, which meant no one gave a rat’s ass about my opinion, but, at least technically, I had a say in the most important decision regarding her professional career.

Allison and I had discussed it. I told her that I wouldn’t speak on her behalf when she came up. Nor would I vote for her if I was the deciding the vote.

She laughed. “Mark, if you’re the deciding the vote, I’m not going to get tenure.”

We laughed about that because it was true.

Before I was allowed to go, he said, “This is an ongoing investigation, so are you not to discuss it with anyone. To do so would be a violation of your obligations under the faculty ethical code, and could lead to disciplinary action, even if no other wrongful conduct was deemed to have occurred. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And that, needless to say, includes most of all, that you are not to have any contact with Professor Walling,” he added.

It was needlessly said. I already knew that was wo he meant when he said no discussions. I also was six steps ahead of him by then, trying to figure out how to engage Allison without him knowing.

The moment I was out of the building, I texted Allison.

Need to talk to you ASAP. Important.

She was still in class. It ended at one.

Normally she texted within a minute or two of the bell.

But for the next thirty minutes, I waited for her to respond.

And she didn’t.

All the while, I stood across the street from the department building longer than necessary, pretending to read email on my phone. Thinking that perhaps her phone had lost charge, and that’s why she hadn’t texted back, but that she’d any moment step outside with that half-smile she used when she knew no one was watching.

When I hadn’t heard or seen from her by 1:15, I suspected that she’d been intercepted by Lily and her egg-headed henchman.

When Allison still hadn’t responded by two, I assumed her interview had gone longer than mine.

At three, I knew she wasn’t going to respond. Not because she was busy, or angry, or teaching another class. Because Hunter had told her the same thing he told me.

And, unlike me, she was heeding his warning.

Rachel was surprised to see me home.

She worked from home on Wednesdays and Fridays, one of the accommodations her firm gives its partners.

“I thought you had your seminar on Wednesday afternoons,” she said.

That’s what I’d told her. To explain why I was unreachable from two to five.

“Cancelled,” I said.

For a moment she looked at me the way she sometimes did to make clear to me she knew something was off but didn’t care enough to question. “Well, it’s a very nice surprise. Unfortunately, I’ve got a few more hours to go, and a conference call at five.”

“Maybe I should take Hannah to the park, give you some alone time.”

My motivation wasn’t Rachel’s alone time. I needed to sit in the park and stare at my phone until Allison texted.

Hannah sat in the sand box. I intermittently shifted my attention from my daughter to my phone.

The one-time Allison and I discussed what would happen if either of us were confronted – either by our spouses or the university -- we agreed on the strategy.

Deny, deny, deny.

“There’s thinking you know and really knowing,” Allison once said. “And none the twain shall meet.”

Which told me that Allison’s silence was out of her concern the university could track her texts somehow. I’m not as paranoid, but it makes sense. Whatever needs to be said can wait until tomorrow – when we see each other and there is no electronic record.

When I look up, Sophie is waving at me from the sandbox. Not like a parade queen — the shorter, sharper wave that means I’m being summoned.

I slide my phone into my pocket, making sure it will vibrate if a message comes through.

At the swings, Sophie is screaming Higher.

After a few pushes she’s reached cruising altitude. I decide the moment calls for a picture. So, I move around the swing set, framing the shot in my head — the ear-to-ear grin she gets when eating ice cream or when Rachel comes home from a trip.

But when I pull out my phone, I see a text.

For some reason it hadn’t buzzed.

I’m momentarily elated. And then the bottom falls out.

The message isn’t from Allison.

It’s from Lily.

A Zoom link. Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m.

I don’t accept the invitation. Instead, I text her.

I have a class at ten.

Her reply comes immediately.

It’s been cancelled.

Rachel and I alternate nights putting the girls to bed. The idea is that one of us gets the full hour off every other day while the other reads to Sophie and then, once she’s down, to Hannah.

Tonight is my night.

Sophie’s routine has held steady lately: first Owl Babies, then How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? ending with Goodnight Moon.

After we say goodnight to noises everywhere, she asks for a song, which is her newest stall tactic. I sing the chorus of Yellow Submarine because she likes to change the color.

Tonight, it’s pink.

Hannah has graduated to chapter books. We’re midway through Unicorn Academy. Tonight, we read two chapters—one more than usual, which I tell myself is penance.

Then she asks for Yellow Submarine too, probably because she heard my rendition with Sophie.

Her color is blue.

I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket. For a moment my heart lifts. But when I check the phone, it sinks again.

False alarm. No message.

Rachel has a glass of wine in her hand when I come back out to the kitchen. She says dinner’s in the oven, and it’ll be another five minutes.

I almost ask what we’re eating but stop myself. It doesn’t matter.

“Everything okay?” Rachel asks over dinner.

The question hangs there a second longer than it should. Long enough that I wonder if she already knows something.

“Yeah,” I say. “All good.”

And it will be, I tell myself.

I have tenure.

It’s not like I slept with a student. Or worse, something non-consensual.

This is two married people who work together having an affair.

It’s practically a cliché it happens so often. If we were on a TV show, it would practically be required.

Rachel is already dressed when I open my eyes the next morning. She tells me she has an early meeting. For a moment, I worry she’s going to ask me to take Hannah to school, but instead she says our nanny is coming in early.

She kisses me on the lips—a quick peck—and leaves.

Ten minutes later Jen lets herself in. She knows not to come into the bedroom in the morning, so I lie there listening as she tells the girls she’ll be taking them to school.

By the time I shower and get dressed, they’re gone. For a second I consider taking the Zoom call somewhere else, just in case Rachel comes back, or Jen does. But that seems unlikely, and if it happens, I’ll improvise.

I’ve gotten good at that.

So, I set up my laptop at the dining room table.

It’s 9:30.

I have time.

By now I’ve checked my phone so many times that I’m surprised it still has charge.

No texts, no calls, no emails from Allison.

Strangely, I’m not worried about that anymore.

We’ll talk as soon as this is over.

At 9:59, I pressed the button to join.

The host will let you in soon.

I sat up a little straighter.

At exactly 10:00, faces popped on to the screen one by one.

Lily appeared to be in her office. Hunter somewhere else, his head just as shiny as it had been in person. A third a woman, someone in her forties, with the calm expression indicating she’d sat through many conversations like this was there too, her name read Reena Patel.

“Good morning, Mark,” Lily said.

“Morning.”

“You remember Elliot Hunter from the other day. And this is Reena Patel from Faculty Affairs.”

The woman nodded politely.

“We appreciate you making time to speak with us,” Hunter said.

I almost smiled at that. As if I had been given a choice.

“Of course.”

A pause followed. Not long. Just long enough to feel deliberate.

Hunter glanced down at a sheet of paper. Apparently, there was a script.

“Professor Ellis, since we spoke yesterday, we’ve continued our review of this matter.”

I nodded, trying to look attentive rather than defensive.

“And we’ve made a preliminary determination.”

Preliminary was good.

Preliminary meant temporary.

“You will be relieved of your duties for the remainder of the semester. With our recommendation that you be terminated from your position at the university for cause.”

For a moment the sentence didn’t make sense. The words arrived separately and refused to assemble into meaning.

“How can something preliminary be permanent?” I asked, as if I’d caught them in a lie.

“Mark, as you know, removing a tenured professor requires a vote of the department and ratification by the provost,” Lily said. “That vote has already occurred. The matter is now awaiting the provost’s ratification.”

The vote had already happened. My colleagues — people I considered friends — had fired me.

“Is due process something the university only teaches in the law school?” I said.

I could see my own smug expression reflected back at me on the screen.

“We can assure you proper procedures were followed,” Hunter said.

Lily sighed, loudly enough that Zoom shifted the screen toward her.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I told you, Professor Walling and I are just friends. Nothing more.”

Even as I said it, it sounded ridiculous. Professor Walling.

“And we told you not to lie to us, Professor Ellis,” Hunter said.

I opened my mouth.

I was about to lie again.

Something in me hesitated.

“Mark,” Lily said quietly, “we have proof that you and Allison were more than friends.”

Hunter leaned slightly forward in his little square. “That issue is no longer up for discussion,” he said. “On its own, the sexual relationship between a tenured and non-tenured faculty member is grounds for termination. In addition, you obstructed the investigation.”

“Obstructed?” I said, my voice rising. “I didn’t even know you were investigating anything. I didn’t obstruct anything.”

“You lied to us,” Lily said. Not angry. Almost tired. “That’s the obstruction.”

I kept my face still.

“But I didn’t.”

No one reacted.

Not Lily.

Not Patel.

Not Hunter.

Hunter made a small note on the paper in front of him.

“Your access to university property is suspended effective immediately,” he said, now reading. “You are not to attend campus events or attempt to access university systems remotely.”

“My work is on that computer.”

“When the process concludes, we’ll arrange for you to retrieve your belongings,” Lily said.

I barely heard her.

My work didn’t matter anymore.

Now all I was thinking about was how to get even with them.

I’d find another job. A better one. Harvard had been sniffing around. Or maybe somewhere on the West Coast.

Allison was from the Bay Area.

And that’s when it clicked.

They said they had proof.

We never used email. Our phones weren’t university property.

The fight drained out of me.

“What about Allison?” I asked.

“We view Allison as a victim in this situation,” Lily said. “The university will not be taking disciplinary action against her. She has requested—and I sincerely hope you honor this—that you not contact her.”

Something inside my chest dropped. Hard.

I understood, suddenly, why Allison hadn’t responded.

Everything felt unreal.

But the feeling itself wasn’t.

I’d felt it before.

On the plane.

Only then there had been the possibility that the crash might save me from my life.

Now there wasn’t.

After Rachel came home, I told her I decided to take some time off work. I said I hadn’t been feeling well. Mentally. That I needed a break. I told her the university had been very nice about it—that they would cover my classes and not to worry.

She nodded as if all of this made perfect sense.

Which told me she knew that it didn’t.

She went to bed early, while I was still in the living room. The show we’d been watching wasn’t over, but Rachel had apparently had enough. As she got up, she told me she was taking the girls to her parents for the weekend.

She didn’t suggest I come with them, and I didn’t ask.

Once I was alone, I found myself thinking about the fajita plates from my lesson the previous day.

You know the plate is hot.
You know it’s going to burn if you touch it.

And you do it anyway.

I knew the plate was hot.

I touched it anyway.

And I kept touching it.

That’s the full extent of my online presence. No Instagram or TikTok. No X (formerly Twitter) or even Venmo. Just what I need to make partner and find a partner – my go to joke – which isn’t even true because I’m not looking to get married.

If you lined up my profiles, you wouldn’t know they belonged to the same guy. On the dating ones, I’ve got a casual headshot with a little scruff, but not a full beard, a tennis photo that suggests both “athletic” and “upper-middle class,” and stats that say six feet, regular exerciser, wants kids, loves to cook. Two lies in there: I’m 5’11 and I don’t cook. Also, I haven’t been to the gym in six months, but regular seems aspirational, so I feel that’s okay.

My firm insists that my website bio and LinkedIn be identical – something about synergy – so both capture me in a $2,000 suit, clean-shaven, and describe my practice as specializing in all aspects of commercial litigation – even though that specialization has so far amounted to nothing more than proofreading briefs and reviewing documents.

Sometimes I wonder which one is the real me -- the polished corporate litigator or the carefree dating app guy. The answer is always the same – neither. By which maybe I mean, both. But for whatever reason, I haven’t yet been able to find that happy medium, and instead I seem to bounce back and forth between the extremes.

The woman with whom I’m currently exchanging witty banter via the Hinge messaging system has only shared her first name – Sara. She’s pretty with a nice body – at least as far as I can discern from her photos, and, I’m not going to lie, a woman’s photos are pretty much my sole criteria in deciding whether to swipe right. Hers are no doubt as carefully curated as mine: one at a wedding in a pale green dress that showed off her shoulders; one mid-hike with a wide, unguarded smile; one artsy black-and-white shot that I suspected she uses as her headshot.

I’ll read the profile, but unless they say serial killer or racist – and very few do – it’s not part of the consideration at the early stages. In Sara’s case, hers says she’s an actor --not actress -- and that’s she’s twenty-nine. I suspect that someday soon she’ll confess that she’s older, and blame the patriarchy for the need to remain in a demographic searched by men over thirty, and I won’t be in a position to complain because I’m that demographic and my parameters cut-off would-be matches at 29.

I’ve already mentioned the name of my law firm. Women never reveal where they work until you’ve at least seen them naked, and sometimes not even then. I get it -- they fear stalkers. I share my employer upfront because nothing sells me faster. I seem to appeal to two types of women: those looking to land a husband with some earning power, and the career-driven ones who want a man who won’t be intimidated by that. My employment at Rawls Ryan & Gold is catnip to both.

Sara is definitely the first type.

After convincing myself as best I can from a fifteen-minute conversation that feels more like an interview that there are no red-flags, I suggest we meet for a drink. I leave Sara the choice of whether that means alcohol or coffee. I prefer to meet for coffee because there’s not much you can learn about a woman from whether she likes chardonnay or pinot grigio (though I admit I’m impressed if she orders Sancerre), but if she’s one of those double-shot, three-pumps, mint-foam types, you know pretty much everything before she says word one. That said, starting with alcohol greatly increases the odds of ending with sex.

Sara says coffee would be best. I suggest a spot near my office because I’ll be going back to work after. My sign off is – See you tomorrow. Hers is a smiley face emoji.

* * *

A day in my life always begins when the alarm goes off at 8:00 a.m. I never sleep in on weekends because the only difference between Monday through Friday and Saturday and Sunday is that, on the weekends, I don’t wear a suit and the streets are less crowded on my way to the office.

My pillow-to-door commute is forty-five minutes, no matter what. I can walk the thirty blocks, take the bus, or the subway—it comes out the same. In decent weather I walk; otherwise, I take the bus, so at least I catch a little sun, which won’t happen again until I repeat the path tomorrow.

The Resolve Pharma team meets every day (by which they mean non-weekend, although I’m hardly alone in working the weekends too) morning at ten. For every minute you’re late, you lose five bucks from your bonus. Miss it completely without prior dispensation and it’s $500. Seriously. I haven’t lost anything yet. Very few people have.

The point of this meeting is to make sure we’re all in the office, billing time. And it works, because these thirty-minute gatherings cost the client about $5,000, even before we start doing that day’s real work, although the firm has taught us how to bill it so the client can’t figure that out. We’re supposed to say – analyzed . . . this or that – and break the hour into increments of 15 to 20 minutes. That way, everyone’s time is recorded differently and when the client reviews the billing it won’t look like thirteen of us were billing about a grand each to be bored to tears in a one-hour meeting that could have been an email.

Believe me, you’d be bored in two seconds if I explained what the case is about. Suffice it to say: money. A lot of it. So much that no one cares the legal fees will hit $50 million. Correction: the client doesn’t care – at least if we do the bare minimum to make it seem as if we’re not churning. Which we do. The firm is considerate in that way.

We always sit in the same seats, which has its own pecking order. I’m at the far end, denoting that I am the most junior member of the team. Today, however, to my utter joy there’s someone new. I normally don’t care when team members are added, but she looks junior to me, which makes my heart swell. I’ve longed for the day when I can push work onto someone else, rather than have it all shoved in my direction.

“Everybody, listen up,” says Elliot Ryan. He’s a partner in his late forties, bald and always in a bowtie, which has the likely unintended effect of making him look like Humpty-Dumpty. He runs both these meetings and the case, at least until trial, when Martin Gold – the last name on the masthead -- will step in to do his magic. “We have a lot to get through this morning,” Elliot says, as he always does. “But first, I want to introduce the newest member of the team: please give it up for Dylan Connors.”

The new arrival gives a little wave, like she’s on a parade float. She’s attractive – nice smile, not overweight, good skin -- but not distractingly so, thanks to the oversized black glasses and the severe way she pulls her hair back. I get the sense that her look is purposeful, so she only gets the attention she wants at the office.

“Dylan comes to us from a clerkship on the Second Circuit with Judge Margaret Quinn.”

A Second Circuit clerkship is reserved for the crème de la crème—just one step below the Supremes. More importantly for my purposes, it means Dylan’s not junior to me because even though she’s new to the firm, she’s one year out of law school, like me.

“Before that, she clerked for our very best friend in the whole world, none other than Judge Ippolito,” Elliot says.

Damn. That means she’s senior to me. Not only that, she knows the judge presiding over our case. I remain the lowest run on an ever expanding latter, which means that rather than the newbie’s arrival giving me someone on whom to push off my work, I’ve just become the recipient of even more grunt work that will be sliding downhill.

* * *

Although I’ve got another four hours of work, at least, at 5:30, I leave the office for what I presume will be a 30-minute break to size up Sara in real life. She’s already at the coffee shop when I arrive, and I check my phone to make sure I’m not late, and I’m not. She’s obviously one of those people who likes to get to places early.

At first sight, I’m convinced Sara is in her thirties. Our early banter is more reconnaissance about how old she actually is than getting to know her, so I ask the ages of her siblings, whether she knew the one person at her college who was my year in high school, how long she’s been in New York. I even try for first pop-star crush, but she parries too smoothly to give anything up. She’s well practiced at being twenty-nine, the fake years of her birth, high school, and college graduations etched into memory.

As we segue into other topics – work, hobbies, movies, singers, books we like – I’m impressed by Sara’s ability to bring to life this person she’s undoubtedly created after numerous trial and error, and it makes me think she’s probably a very good actor. She’s got the tics down pat—the casual shrug, the pause just long enough to seem thoughtful but never caught off guard. I’m not judging; I’m playing a part that isn’t really me too. Still, there’s something about watching someone else perform that makes you feel even more like a fraud, because they’ve managed to convince themselves they are the part they play – a method actor type – while you’re still firmly in the land of make believe.

She doesn’t quiz me about whether I’m actually six feet tall or what my favorite recipes are. Instead, she zeroes in on work, confirming that’s what she finds most attractive about me. I have two patters when it comes to that: the women in the field hear the life of a grunt saga, which makes me sound humble. The ones who don’t know better get the I’m the shining light of the legal profession shpiel.

“I’m working on this massive case—Resolve Pharma versus Amazon,” I say, “It’s in the public domain, so I can mention the players and the facts. My client is asserting damages of over four billion, but I suspect we’ll ultimately settle for something in the fifty-to-sixty percent range, but not for another three, maybe more, years. I just got back from a month-long trial in Little Rock. Everything about it was awful except the verdict—$227 million—and that turned into a very nice bonus.”

She tells me she’s writing a play because if you don’t create your own content, you can’t get noticed. “It’s a weird thing about being an actor,” she says. “If you’re a musician or a comedian, you can play an open mic or even on the subway platform. But you can’t act unless you’re cast, and you won’t be cast unless you’re seen.”

There’s an earnestness in the way she talks about her craft that I don’t hear very often

from my contemporaries when discussing work. At the firm, everyone speaks in billable increments, and every idea has an ROI attached. Then again, Sara’s passion might be because acting isn’t really work in the sense that no one is paying her do it. Perhaps if I fancied myself a professional tennis player, practicing to make the tour, I’d have that same level of someday, maybe, about me too.

Still, I envy that Sara’s nights are spent not in pursuit of money that is based on a formula, and impressed that she perseveres not to win some prize, but out of this quiet, almost defiant stubbornness: the need to make something, or risk disappearing. I can’t remember the last time I did anything that wasn’t tied to a metric—and the fact that, for me, the prize is always money seems almost pathetic when I can see in her face that greater rewards exist.

I want to respond in kind—to express to her that I have a passion for what I do—but

that’s a lie beyond even my ability to pull off. Though I can summon the will to say my work is important—in the sense that hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes more, are on the line—I can’t pretend I care about it apart from the fact that it pays me very well.

I wasn’t always that way. Or at least, that’s the myth of myself to which I cling. I remember a time when I thought being a lawyer was about helping the disadvantaged—visions of justice, maybe even public service—driving me. How that urgency calcified into billable hours and bonus structures, I’m not entirely sure. I tell myself it’s a siren song few can resist, but listening to Sara describe how she’s stayed true to her dreams, I feel the faint tug of that younger version of me, and have to admit that I sometimes miss him.

If Sara finds me as shallow as I do in this moment, she doesn’t show it. Instead, when our coffees are finished, she asks if I want to “get out of here,” and her tone suggests sex is, if not implied, at least on the table. After checking my emails to see that no one back at the office is looking for me, I tell her to lead the way.

Our next stop is a bar five blocks south. After she orders a second martini, I decide the investment – of forgoing the billable hours tonight as well as paying for her meal -- is worth it, so I suggest a Mexican place for dinner—walking distance, but crucially another five blocks closer to my apartment.

At the restaurant, I go straight to the men’s room. From there, I answer the few emails that have come my way, and to the one to the senior associate I mention that I’m not feeling well, and will head home early. I sent that one at eight.

When I return to the table, Sara has ordered another martini. We split a plate of nachos, which seems incongruous with her drink order. When I ask if she wants an entrée, she smiles and shakes her head in a way that tells me she’s satisfied, at least with regard to food.

The sex is good, but even while we were going at it, I’m thinking she’s in her thirties. It’s not anything about her body that’s the tell, but she has a confidence that suggests some seasoning.

Sure enough, when it’s over, when we’re in that time that I suspect she finds the most intimate, she says, “I have a small confession to make. I’m actually thirty-one.”

She flashes a smile as practiced as her ability to claim that she loved BTS when she almost certainly cut her boy-band teeth on One Direction. I laugh as if to say it’s no big deal, and then to bring that point home offer my own confession about not being able to cook and being a shade under six feet tall.

She laughs right back and says something about this being a part of our meet-cute, whatever that means. Then she nuzzles her head onto my chest. As first dates go, this was a pretty good one.

* * *

Dylan was assigned to review documents, which was my job too. The way it worked was that a vendor used AI to filter responsive documents based on search terms and relevance. That culled a gazillion to merely a bazillion. The most junior members of the team (plural now) then categorized those bazillion into three groups: to be produced (half a bazillion); important (ten thousand); and actually important (a few hundred).

I performed this needle in a haystack work chained to my computer, my index finger tapping the tab bar as one Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint deck or HHS report or whatever came across the screen and a designation was made. My eyes only really focused when I saw an email—because sometimes those were important—but ninety-nine times out of a hundred they were just to arrange a meeting.

Sometimes, I’d look up and realize hours had passed without my standing once. Worse, that I hadn’t found anything remotely important—certainly nothing to justify the nearly thousand dollars an hour the client was being billed for my time. Every so often, I’d catch myself fantasizing about discovering the one document that cracked the case wide open. In my mind, I’d race through the halls like Charlie Bucket with the golden ticket, waving the scrap of paper that would change everything, my future suddenly secured.

Dylan and I decided to meet for dinner to compare notes, but I think she realized that if she didn’t have dinner with someone it was going to be a lonely existence – which was the life I’d been living before she arrived on the scene.

We met in an interior office on my floor. I might not actually be experienced in all aspects of litigation as my website bio proclaimed, but I was extremely adept at ordering dinner and charging the firm, so I shared my expertise in that matter.

“My go to is this steakhouse a block over,” I said. “Usually I get the filet, because they only do the New York strip for two, but if you’re game, we can do that.”

“Okay,” she said. “Medium rare?”

“Here’s my trick,” I said, as if I was passing along insider information. “I order it rare because the meat will still be cooking during delivery, and so when it arrives, it’ll be medium rare.”

As we waited, for our food to arrive, she kicked off her heels under the table, and stretched in a way that I couldn’t help but watch. As if she realized I might be getting the wrong idea, she quickly told me that she was engaged, and that her intended was an investment banker at Goldman, named Bradley.

When she asked me for my story, I told her the basics – college at Tufts, UVA for law school. When she gave me that look that suggested I needed to say something not on my firm bio, I mentioned Sara, and her eyes widened, suggesting I go on.

“She’s an actor – not an actress – and also, oddly enough, has no H at the end of her name.”

“Why is that odd?” Dylan asked.

“I don’t know, but isn’t it? I mean, why not have an H if you can, right?”

She shrugged. “I had a friend named Cara in college and I never wondered why she didn’t have an H.”

“Well, I guess that’s just the difference between us, Dylan. I’m naturally inquisitive in that way.”

* * *

Sara and I spent our first Valentine’s Day at a restaurant she’d been talking about for weeks — the kind of place where the lighting was designed for Instagram and the tables were so close together it felt like eavesdropping was encouraged. The couple next to us toasted with pink champagne and another staged a selfie that required multiple takes. Taking it all in, I tried to imagine us as one of those couples that loved the same things, and wondered if the cliché about opposites attracting was true beyond magnets.

We’d been together two months by then, though most of it was weekends and the occasional late night at my place after I stumbled out of the office. Early on, she’d asked me about past relationships — that casual-but-not-casual question meant to measure whether I was built for commitment. I told her that since coming to New York, I hadn’t met the one, and I usually ended things before they dragged. When that seemed to have disappointed her, I added that I’d had a long-term girlfriend in law school, but she wanted entertainment law in Los Angeles while I wanted finance in New York.

Sara nodded as if I’d passed a test, but I wasn’t sure she really understood the import of what I’d revealed. For her the takeaway was no doubt that I’d proven that I could be part of a real couple. But the larger lesson was that I’d chosen career over love. Not that I’d been in love with my law school girlfriend, but Sara didn’t know that, or think to even ask.

On March 23, Sara became the longest relationship I’d had as a non-student, which I didn’t share with her, and to be honest, scared me. Relationships were a little like jobs in that you understood if you got fired in the first ninety days but after that, you felt like you had tenure unless you really screwed up.

In April, she mentioned going to Edinburgh in August, where a friend of hers was performing at the fringe festival, and asked me to come with. I recognized the invitation as right out of the standard playbook of testing if I had an expiration date on our relationship. I wasn’t sure I’d be going, but I told Sara it sounded like a great plan because there really was no other acceptable answer to that question.

* * *

Dylan and I referred to our nightly dinners as hibernations – a moment when we escaped the dark cave of document review to engage with the world. During those meals, I shared things with her that my longest held friends didn’t know – that I felt like a striver, never quite good enough -- as well as far less weighty things, like that I hate-watched The Bachelor to fall asleep, cried sometimes while reading, but never in movies, and that I could recite the balcony scene in Romeo & Juliet because we had to memorize in ninth grade and I’d been unable to dislodge it from my brain.

After years of being strategic with my disclosures, calibrating the version of myself depending on my audience -- the confident associate for partners, the charming guy for dates, the reliable friend for everyone else – with Dylan I was just me. In sharing things with Dylan I wasn’t looking for absolution or sympathy, I was just explaining who I was without fear or recrimination. It was easy to do that because she didn’t judge. Instead, she just listened, like the way you carefully read a book to understand the author’s meaning without wanting to change the ending.

Dylan was equally honest with me – about big things and small. So I learned that she didn’t have a driver’s license, was afraid to fly, but did it when she had to by popping two Xanax, and that Bradley worked even longer hours than she did, which made her concerned about how they’d ever be able to have a family, although his answer was that they’d have a lot of help.

Whenever she spoke about herself, I tried to picture Dylan’s life outside of Rawls Ryan, and the image that came to my head was not welcome. Bradley, shirtless in bed, Dylan beside him, in lingerie. Laughing about how wonderful their lives were, how much money they made, how sad it was for anyone that wasn’t them. But I caught myself – or maybe tried to talk myself out of that ideal. Dylan didn’t present her life with Bradley that way. In fact, she hardly presented her life with him at all. Maybe that was simply a matter of respecting boundaries, but most brides to be, at least in my experience, have the ability to discuss wedding arrangements as if they were matters of national security. Even Sara spent a good portion of our discussions relaying whatever crises one of her girlfriends was going through over guest list limitations or the color of the bridesmaid dresses. Dylan wasn’t that way at all. If I pressed – which I sometimes did just to gage her reaction – asking about the kinds of things Sara did when discussing her friend’s weddings – bridesmaid dresses, flower arrangements, even honeymoon plans, Dylan would dismissively reply that all of that had been outsourced to Bradley.

“He’s a bit of a control freak,” she said more than once. I might have viewed the comment as charged except that she usually added, “About things that I let him control,” and then she’d flash that smile of hers — the one that could make you forget for a second that she belonged to someone else.

* * *

Sara’s birthday was in late April. We went to a restaurant that was exactly the kind of place that I expected it to be -- dim lighting that made everyone look more attractive, minimalist décor that signaled expense without shouting it, waiters in matching black aprons who described every dish as if reciting poetry. I’d pretended to care when she’d told me weeks earlier that getting a reservation was a minor miracle on account of the fact it been featured on some television show that Sara watched that I didn’t.

Her birthday gift was another one of those relationship minefields. Too little – money or thought – she’d interpret as a lack of seriousness. So I coupled the sapphire pendant necklace with a note that showed I wasn’t all that thoughtful after all, because I’d managed to convey how much I’d enjoyed our time together without using the L word once.

She said she loved the necklace, and immediately removed the one she was wearing, and asked that I put my gift around her neck. When I returned to my seat, she said, “Confession time. Your lovely note should have said To Sara on her 33^rd birthday.”

I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or roll my eyes. There was something almost endearing about the way she said it, like a kid fessing up to sneaking an extra cookie.

“You know, algorithms and wishful thinking,” she said with an exaggerated frowny face.

“Anyway, that’s the last thing I’ve withheld from you, so I’m glad that’s out there.”

I was tempted to say that it wasn’t actually an omission, but an outright lie. The second one about the same thing, in fact. I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t claim the moral high ground. My falsehoods might be more of the omission variety, but that was a very thin reed to rely upon when the result was the same type of deception.

Besides, in the same ways that all lies are not equal, not all omissions are either. And between her lie and my omission, mine remained the more serious transgression.

* * *

I didn’t tell Dylan about my birthday dinner with Sara – and that she was even older than I’d thought, which was older than I’d originally been led to believe -- because before I could, Dylan said, “Bradley is looking forward to meeting you.”

We were having dinner, in the conference room on 57^th, which had a panoramic view of the city, and had become our dining room about a month into our gatherings. Over time, these dinners had become something more than a shared break from document review. There was a rhythm to them now—the way she’d always claim the chair with the skyline view, telling me that the woman always faced out into the restaurant. I had become proficient in predicting her order with alarming accuracy, but sometimes I ordered something I didn’t even want to deny her the same victory. How we’d talk about our day like an old married couple, but also about our hopes and dreams as if we were a young married couple.

Of course, our actual significant others sometimes invaded these intimate moments. Sometimes I felt like was betraying Dylan more than Sara when I shared something about my life outside this space. Dylan, however, never let on that she thought there was anything untoward about how close she and I had become. I got the sense that she shared with Bradley everything that she and I said, which answered the question I had long been asking myself about which of the women in my life I was truly betraying – it was both of them. Although I was an open book with Dylan about myself, I hadn’t shared with her the plans I had with Sara for August. And it had been a very long time since I’d even brought up Dylan to Sara, although she asked me about Dylan’s wedding in a way that made me think it was a countdown.

The meeting between Bradley and me that Dylan had referenced was not theoretical. The annual Rawls Ryan & Gold dinner-dance slash work function slash ninth circle of hell was coming up in two weeks. It was black tie (because of course it was), always held in some over-the-top venue (again, of course), with caviar aplenty (naturally).

“Is that right?” I replied, although I realized a beat too late that the better response would have been to mirror back that I was looking forward to meeting the man she was about to marry, even if it wasn’t true.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to meet Bradley – yes, that is what it was, actually. Better stated, my resistance wasn’t borne from jealousy – although, again, maybe it was exactly that – but I thought of it as more of an insecurity thing. I’d seen his photograph – more handsome -- and read his bio – better pedigree -- and Goldman --- richer, so it wasn’t like I didn’t come to the feeling honestly.

“He’s started referring to you as my work husband,” she said.

“Not sure how to take that.”

“To be honest, I’m not completely sure how he means it.”.

“I assume you’ve told him that I have thus far been able to hide from you my undying love.”

“How could I do that,” she said, looking serious, which maybe was deserved given that I’d crossed a line.

“I’m sorry. I meant –”

Before I could finish the thought, she spoke over me. “How could I tell him that you’ve hidden something from me unless I can see it?” She let the thought marinate for a moment, and then said, “Well, I’m looking forward to meeting Sara-no H. You’re taking her to the prom, right?

“She’s super-excited,” I said, emphasizing it in a way that mocked her enthusiasm a little too much.

Even as the words left my mouth, I regretted the tone. There was a fine line between teasing and betraying too much of what sat underneath, and I’d just crossed it. Dylan’s eyes narrowed, recalibrating, like the way the map lady in my phone does when I’ve taken a wrong turn. I did my utmost to look casual, to give her the version of me she was used to, the one that suggested that I wasn’t – hadn’t – fallen in love with her.

Then she laughed, which suggested I’d pulled off the ruse. Still, there was something about the way she tilted her head when the laughter subsided that told me she’d caught a glimpse of something I hadn’t meant to show. It was quick—barely perceptible—but that was the thing between Dylan and me: we always joked that we had no secrets from each other, and yet I’d been mightily keeping that one under wraps. Now, suddenly, it was out in the open.

* * *

Sara looked good, but not too good, which was where I wanted her to be on that continuum to meet not only the partners, but Dylan too. If she looked too good, people would think I was shallow; not good enough and there might be an issue about my confidence. To bring her into that sweet spot, I’d vetted her dress, choosing the black one she was wearing over a half dozen other bridal party gowns in her closet that were of varying pastel shades. In heels she was slightly taller than me, which caused to her joke about my not being six feet, and I bit my tongue rather than mention she was the last person who should be throwing stones.

The over-the-top venue – the Egyptian Room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – was truly a sight to behold. An enormous space, the size of a baseball field, with a thirty foot ceiling and a main exterior wall of glass. A large reflecting pool and makeshift pyramid were the only things usually in the space, but tonight Rawls Ryan had assembled round tables and candles practically everywhere.

I made my way toward Elliot – as sucking up to partners was really the objective of the evening. He was surrounded by other members of the Resolve Pharma team. Predictably, they were discussing the case. Someone asked Sara if she was a lawyer, and she said, “God no,” like they’d asked if she was a witch. Then she explained she was an actor, and I suddenly felt like a cliché.

We excused ourselves shortly thereafter to get a drink – which I desperately needed, but also realized I had to be careful about. People still talked about the associate who threw up on Martin Gold, and that happened during the Obama administration.

Sara and I were plotting our next move, when I saw Dylan enter. She looked even more beautiful than I’d imagined, which was saying something. Her dress was tasteful but form-fitting enough to send a message, and for the first time I could remember, her hair was down and she was without glasses.

She caught my eye and tugged Bradley’s arm to lead him toward us. In that brief span between her seeing me and reaching us, it felt as if the whole night shifted. This wasn’t just another work function anymore; it was the collision of two versions of my life I’d kept carefully separate. When Dylan kissed me on the cheek -- our first physical contact ever – I felt thrilled and embarrassed, not to mention the heat of Sara’s eyes burning a hole in my head.

After I introduced her to Sara, Dylan extended her hand. “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you.”

“Likewise,” Sara said. “So happy to put a face to the name.”

I could tell Sara didn’t like that face. Way prettier than you described, I imagined her saying later—as if my not objectifying work colleagues was a red flag. The one saving grace—ironically enough—was Bradley. If anything suggested Sara had nothing to worry about regarding Dylan, it was the man who’d already put a ring on it.

Bradley had that effortless charm that I’d imagined, and even though I was poised to hate everything about him, found that more difficult to do when he started to engage. He had the kind of handshake that made you feel like you mattered, and whereas I’d expected him to look at Dylan like she was no more important to him than his Patek Phillippe, the way he stood a half step behind her suggested that he understood he was assigned a supporting role this evening.

“Have you made the rounds?” Dylan asked.
“A little bit,” I said. “Sucked up a little to Elliot.

“I almost lost it when I was introduced to him,” Sara said. “He really does look like

Humpty Dumpty.”

“I can’t believe you told her that,” Dylan said, as if it was a secret we shared. “I’d hate to hear what cartoon you tell Sara that I remind you of.”

“Hmm,” I said, pretending to think. The obvious answer was Belle from Beauty and the Beast—the large, brown eyes, flawless skin, and intelligence that made you not immediately think of her beauty. But I knew enough not to say something that complimentary about another woman while standing beside my girlfriend. “Eliza from Wild Thornberrys?” I said. “You know, the ears, maybe.”

Without missing a beat, Dylan said, “That’s such a coincidence because I’ve long thought you bear a striking resemblance Eliza’s pet monkey, so it kind of works.”

Bradley laughed, but then his eyes narrowed. “I don’t think that’s right,” he said, looking at me. “Dylan, of course, is the spitting image of Kim Possible—once she’s not wearing glasses and lets her hair down. But you…” He let the pause linger. “I’m going to go with Bruce Wayne. Not Batman—just to be clear, because you’re more secret identity type.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“I think so. Easy going on the surface, maybe, but something darker beneath. Don’t you

think so, Dylan?”

“I’m sticking with Stimpy,” she said, obviously trying to lower the temperature.

“Help a guy out here, Sara,” Bradley said, smiling at her in a way that I suspected usually resulted in his getting his way.

“Well, the truth is that I have very little idea what Mr. Wayne – I mean, Mr. Brodherson -- does when I’m not with him, so maybe. Claims he’s always working late, but who really knows.”

As the laughter from Bradley’s little performance faded, I scanned each of their faces to determine the damage he’d done. Bradley seemed pleased with himself, the easy charmer again, as if he expected me to take the shot like a man. Dylan’s expression had settled into something neutral, but I could see the trace of fear in her eyes that things could escalate from here. Sara was smiling, but there was a glint in her eyes that I recognized as more akin to when you finally get the joke, although in her case, she’d just realized that it had been at her expense.

Dylan then said she had some partner-sucking up to do. We didn’t see them again for the rest of the night.

* * *

It wasn’t until the ten-a.m. meeting on Monday that Dylan and I next crossed paths. After it ended, without announcing her intentions, she followed me to my office and shut the door behind her.

“I’m so, so sorry,” she said.

“For what?”

“For what,” she said, with an eyeroll.

“Oh, if you’re referring to your fiancé comparing me to a man hiding his true self, yes, I suppose an apology is in order. Especially because it wasn’t too long after that my girlfriend suggested that if you and I were having an affair, I should just admit it.”

“Jesus. I’m so sorry,” she said again. “Bradley and I got into it before the party, and then he decided to take it out on me—and thereby you—once we got there. Do you want me to say something to Sara-no H?”

“Yeah, I think that would go over great.”

“Right. Anyway, I really am sorry.”

* * *

I’d probably had more of Wolfgang’s New York strips than I’d had McDonald’s burgers, but that night was the first time I’d ever set foot inside the restaurant. It had been Dylan’s suggestion. She said it was her way of apologizing for any friction she’d caused between Sara and me, although I knew that if Sara found out about it would only add to that tension.

“If we share a steak and order one side and no apps, we can have a bottle of really nice wine and still expense the entire thing,” Dylan said.

To get the firm to pay required that we’d be going back to the office after dinner, which I found dubious if we were sharing a really nice bottle of wine. Still, I wasn’t going to disagree with the possibility of having Rawls Ryan spring for a five-hundred-dollar meal.

Dylan allowed me the tasting honors on the Bordeaux she selected. It was everything a two-hundred-dollar bottle should be – bold and rich and made you feel special. After it was poured, and the waiter had left us to enjoy, Dylan raised her glass in toast.

“To Sara—no H forgiving you.”

I didn’t sip, but instead said, “I think that ship has sailed.”

She put her glass down. “I’m sorry. Did I – and by I, of course I mean Bradley – really do that much damage?”

She looked sincerely concerned, which I had mixed feelings about. “Maybe I should have said I’m no longer interested in booking passage on that particular ship, rather than that it has sailed.”

She laughed, and reclaimed her glass. “To the voyage with someone better.”

This time I didn’t hesitate to clink my glass to hers.

“So, now that it’s over, can I ask you something about Sara—no H?”

“Sure,” I said, wondering what there could possibly be about the woman that I hadn’t already shared.

“Was the sex really great?”

I laughed, much louder than the question deserved. “Is this a trick question?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, how can it be?”

“Well, I get the sense you’re asking because if I say the sex was great it’ll at least make some sense to you why I was with her, but then you’ll think I’m shallow. On the other hand, if I say it was just okay or whatever, then you think that maybe Sara—no H is the kind of woman that I’m attracted to even if she lacks that ability, which I think might make me seem even more shallow.”

“I love how you can turn even the most basic question – is she a freak in the sheets or not – into a referendum on your entire personhood.”

“Let’s just say I had no complaints about her in that department.” I tried to discern if Dylan was disappointed that I hadn’t offered a more negative assessment, but she hid her expression behind another sip of wine. “And while we’re sharing, how does Bradley measure up to the other men on your list?”

She leaned back, as if contemplating the issue for the first time, which I knew couldn’t possibly be true, which meant she was instead considering how to frame it for me. “Well, let me just say that he’s not the best or the worst, and he’s reasonably sure he’s one of those two, and I’ll leave it to you to guess whether he’s insecure or deluded.”

“That sounds about right,” I said.

“Or wrong,” she added, her eyebrows arched.

“You ever wonder if . . . Bradley’s the one?”

“Of course. I think everyone has that doubt. It’s a big world out there, how could you not wonder.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. I don’t think I’ve ever been close to thinking I had found the one, so I didn’t know if it’s like in the movies . . . the world stopping for a moment and you can’t catch your breath.”

“God, I hope not,” she said. “If that’s true love, then I’m royally screwed. But much more interestingly, are you telling me that you have never been in love.”

“Does my childhood golden retriever or the 2012 New York Giants count?”

Dylan’s smile was enough to tell me that they didn’t, but then she said, “Yes, I think so. It gives you a sense of something outside yourself that you want to always be there because it makes you the happiest you can think of being. That’s my definition of love, anyway.”

“Look at you, a romantic at heart,” I said.

She nodded, looking somewhat embarrassed. “Yeah, that’s me,” she said, now sounding anything but.

* * *

We split the check, both of us using our Rawls Ryan credit card. As Dylan had predicted, even with the wine, it wasn’t that much more expensive than our usual meal.

“I believe it will be malpractice if I practice law while intoxicated,” Dylan said.

“What’s the sentence for that – PLUI – practicing law under the influence?”

“A lot more lenient than showing up at my place drunk after dinner with you,” she said.

“It seems as if you have a bit of a problem then. Can’t go to the office. Can’t go home.”

“Do you think you can maybe help a girl out?”

We started walking south, talking and laughing, as if we hadn’t made a decision about

where the evening would end. The streets were slick from the earlier rain, making me conscious not to slip, which seemed more like a metaphor than I would have liked. Dylan never asked where I was leading her, and I didn’t say where we were going. Every block felt like a small dare—either one of us could have called a cab, gone our separate ways. But neither of us did.

We had our first kiss in the elevator. It wasn’t frantic, the way I’d for so long imagined the moment unfolding in my fantasies. It was slow, deliberate, like visiting a place you already knew and taking a moment to allow the memory to merge with the present. Her hands threaded into my hair, and mine traced the outline of her back. When the elevator doors opened at my floor, she smiled, and said, “I guess we’ve arrived,” and her laugh at the double entendre made me feel as if everything in my life had been leading up to this moment.

* * *

“What’s the record for longest foreplay ever?” she said, after. For a moment I was

confused, but then I realized she wasn’t referring to tonight. She meant since we’d met. Then she said, “Thank you,” and for the second time my initial thought was that she meant for tonight, perhaps a compliment or a dig at Bradley’s lackluster skills, but there was something sad about the way she’d said it that made me realize she, once again, wasn’t talking about that.

“You’re welcome,” I said, “but for what, exactly?”
“For helping me avoid what I’ve known for some time was going to be a very bad

decision.”

“Had I known that just one night with me would cause you to send Bradley packing, I

would have done this a long time ago.”

“Don’t. You know better.”

She was right to call me out. I was trying to make her smile, but in so doing, I’d

inadvertently suggested that I didn’t know exactly what she was thinking in that moment, and I suspect that nothing could have made her sadder. Like Dylan, I knew, and had for some time, that what was between us had nothing to do with sex. The fact that I’d fallen in love with her long before we consummated — and while she was engaged to another man — proved that point.

“I’m sorry. I’m just a little surprised that . . . well, I thought I was only one who felt that way, if I’m being honest.”

“I like that you thought that,” she said, kissing me softly.

* * *

Dylan told Bradley the next day that they needed to call off the wedding. He claimed to have been thinking the same thing and that he was actually relieved that she was the bad guy because he didn’t think he could have hurt her.

There was more, I was certain. Accusations and recriminations. Maybe even goodbye sex for all I knew. Things that I suspect Dylan would have shared had we been talking about it in the conference room on 57, eating from containers. But now this discussion was at my dining room table, and I was pouring us both wine, and somehow that meant that there were things between us that no longer needed to be shared, as if we’d substituted one type of intimacy for another.

That night, Dylan had arrived at my place with provisions to last her for the week. She said she was planning to move her stuff out of Bradley’s place when she got one of her own, and thanked me for taking her in to bridge the transition. I wanted to tell her that she never had to leave, but knew that was too much, too soon. Even though her smile suggested she was happier in my place than she’d been in hers for some time, I wasn’t sure if it was the exhilaration of escape that was behind it or excitement about the future.

I broke things off with Sara the next day. We met for lunch, which should have been a tip-off because I don’t think we’d ever seen each other in the daytime. Shortly before I asked for the check, I told her that I didn’t see a future and that we’d both be happier resuming the search for our respective the one.

I didn’t say anything about Dylan. There was no need, I told myself, and sharing that part would only hurt her. It was an omission I told myself, which somehow seemed much more palatable than that I’d been lying to her for months.

She said she was shocked, swore everything between us was going great, that she believed I was the one for her. Even through her tears, I didn’t truly believe her. Like so much between Sara and me, I thought that this was the way she believed she was expected to respond, rather than how she actually felt. But maybe that was because I wanted to believe that she had been preparing herself for this moment because I had seen it coming for so long.

Even though our food had yet to arrive, she folded her napkin slowly, deliberately, as if giving me one last chance to take it all back. When I didn’t, she said what she’d undoubtedly been thinking for months and holding back because it undercut everything that she’d been telling herself about us.

“Note to self,” she said, her voice clipped, her jaw rigid. “Next time, don’t fall in love with someone who’s in love with someone else.”

I should have said something in response, but I didn’t. Sara didn’t expect me to, I don’t think, because she was already making her way out of the restaurant when the line landed.

* * *

That evening, after I came home with the news that I’d ending things with Sara, Dylan

again reminded me that I didn’t have to do that on her account. I’m sure she had intended to suggest that she didn’t want to put pressure on me, but it had the opposite effect, making me feel as if I was still misjudging her feelings for me, just like I had in the months leading up to our first kiss.

But I’d been right in the end, I told myself. Which emboldened me to trust my judgment about us now too.

“Her closing line was that she would remember not to fall in love with someone in love with someone else,” I said.

There were two parts to the statement, and I wondered which one Dylan would latch onto. I was hoping it would be the commentary about us, but she went the other way.

“Do you think she was really in love with you?”

“You say that like you find it hard to believe.”

“Believe me – no,” she said, in a way that made my heart swell. “It’s more that I was kind of hoping that you couldn’t really be in love with someone unless they loved you back. Do you think that’s true?”

In a previous life, I would have deflected. Maybe with humor – Every country song I’d

ever heard suggests otherwise – maybe with something that was personal, but not quite so –Twelve-year-old me would strongly disagree. But I felt as if that I had turned a page from such performances. With Dylan, I was finally the person I wanted to be – or at least I was before we were . . . whatever we were now.

“I think that all depends on whether you love me,” I said.

It felt like the world beyond my apartment had tilted slightly, aligning itself to something new. Dylan leaned back into the couch cushion, and I found myself mirroring her, the kind of synchronicity that didn’t need to be spoken. For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t replaying what I should’ve said or done differently. I had been my truest self.

“I think you just proved my point,” she said. “You can’t be in love unless the other person loves you back.”

At ten, I wanted a Don Mattingly baseball mitt. At twenty, a car. At thirty, Sarah. At forty, just a job. At fifty, to take my family to Europe. Two months before my sixtieth, Sarah posed the question that I’d already been considering for quite some time.

“What do you want for your birthday?”

“I’d like a party,” I said.

She looked at me, startled. Sarah knows parties aren’t my thing. I’ve always preferred one-on-one conversation in a quiet room to small talk with music blaring. She has never made a secret that this part of me mystifies her. Sarah loves meeting new people and claims to not understand why I resist adding to my circle, no matter how many times I’ve told her its because as I prefer spending time with the friends I already have to auditioning new ones.

Her question had been posed while we were in bed, watching one of her British procedurals—quaint village, thatched roofs, two police officers, endless murders – that she says puts her to sleep. At my request for a party, Sarah put the Brits on pause.

“Really?” she said.

“Yes,” I said again.

She smiled – a beam, almost – as if she’d finally converted me to the cause. I don’t mind her thinking that after thirty-one years of marriage, I’ve finally learned to like parties, but that isn’t the reason for my request. Rather than suddenly deciding to stretch beyond my comfort zone, I’m binding myself tighter to what grounds me.

No matter how many Sixty is the new Forty posts I scroll past, my father’s death—fifty-nine, a heart attack out of nowhere—has recently filled me with dread that I might be borrowed time. To celebrate my continued existence, I want to gather the people who have made my life a happy one – and do so while I still can.

“Great,” she said. “You know the rule, right?”

“There’s a rule?”

“The number of guests should equal the age of the birthday boy.”

“I think that applies to children.”

She tilts her head, as if to say, If the shoe fits.

“No worries there,” I said. “I don’t even know sixty people.”

“Of course you do.”

Sarah could fill Mrs. Astor’s ballroom with her friends—high school, college, moms of the boys’ friends, work colleagues, pilates classmates. But I treat friendship the way Marie Kondo treats clutter: if someone doesn’t spark joy, I don’t have room for them in my life.

“Just the core,” I said. “The G-men”—the nickname my father gave Greg and George before we knew what it meant — “Matt, Lisa, my sister, you, and the boys.”

I rattled the names in chronological order. Greg and George have been my friends since kindergarten. Matt and I met first day of freshman year. Lisa was my first law firm officemate. And my sister since her birth, which not three years after my own.

“What about Lily and David? Ellice and Brad? Ted and Margaret?” Sarah asked.

She’s mentioned our couple friends, the ones we see most weekends. I like them, but they’re hers before they’re mine. The names on my list are mine alone.

“For your sixtieth birthday,” I said.

Her knowing smile tells me that she gets it now. I’m not becoming more like her; I’m doubling down on who I am.

“Any idea where you’d like to hold this soiree?”

“I was hoping we could do it here.”

Sarah would prefer a private room in a restaurant, maybe even a rented space. She probably thinks my choice is financial, and I won’t deny that’s part of it. But I want the party in our cramped two-bedroom walk-up for the same reason I curated the guest list: because this place, like those people, matters to me. If the walls could talk, they’d sing. And laugh. And cry.

“I don’t want you to have to do anything,” I added, anticipating her objection. “We’ll cater. Maybe even hire a bartender.”

She agreed with another smile and reached for her phone on the charging station. A few scrolls later: “Your birthday’s a Sunday. So, we’ll do it Saturday night, okay?”

“At my age, the sooner the better,” I said in a deadpan voice – a joke, but one that betrays how I really feel.

Her reply is a kiss—the quick peck reserved for hellos and goodbyes. In our private ranking, it sits at the bottom, above it the real kiss, and then that one—the kiss that always signals the beginning of something more.

“Great. I’ll send the invitations out this week,” she said, and then returned to the British countryside.

* * *

On the night of the party, I am in mid-dressing ritual -- robe on, hair damp -- when I venture into the living room to see if anything needs my attention. Behind the door to the kitchen, I hear Sarah speaking to Chef Paul – tonight’s caterer – and in the living room I spot the bartender setting up.

The invitation made clear that gifts were prohibited, but in the foyer sits a basket of wrapped presents. Not for me, but for our guests. Tonight’s party favors are matching four-by-six silver frames, each holding a photo of me with its recipient that Sarah collected off my phone.

She’s taken a less-is-more approach to decorations, adding only a posterboard atop the mantle of our non-working fireplace. It holds two images: the very first photograph of our family, right after the twins were born, and the four of us at Daniel’s college graduation last year.

Sarah has only become more beautiful over time. She might roll her eyes when I say it, but I swear it’s true. My gaze lingers on her young husband in the first photo, and all I see is the fear I remember from those early days. In the second, I’m smiling so proudly it feels almost as if I’m telling my younger self: Don’t worry. It’s going to turn out even better than you could have imagined.

Sarah bursts through the swinging kitchen door. I’d been in the shower when she dressed, and either we hadn’t discussed her outfit, or I hadn’t been paying attention when we did because the sight of her takes my breath away.

“Too much?” she asks, as if that might have been what I was thinking.

“No, it’s . . . spectacular. New?”

“Yes. And I’m afraid to tell you what it cost.”

“I would have been fine with you paying twice as much.”

She laughs. “I know for a fact that’s a lie. And now I feel very overdressed seeing that you’ve decided to wear this terry cloth ensemble to the party.”

“You don’t like?” I say, striking a model pose. “Would it be better if I ditch the robe and just go towel?”

She rolls her eyes. “Go get dressed.”

“If you insist,” I say. “I’ll do my best to look half as good as you – but you make it hard.”

“That’s what she said,” Sarah says with a wink because that’s the joke I would have made if she’d provided the set-up.

Then she kisses me. It’s a real kiss.

* * *

When I return to the bathroom, my reflection reminds me of how much I resemble my father. I always have, but people used to tell me that I look like him at his age, and that qualifier is no longer needed.

He was a handsome man – more so than me, truth be told – so I’ve always welcomed the comparison. It also meant a lot to me because I believed that we weren’t otherwise alike, a point my mother drove home with alarming consistency. I was like her, she’d always say, and meant it as the compliment that I was ambitious and hardworking and unafraid to dream big. The implication, of course, was that my father was none of those things. Sometimes she tempered the criticism with the explanation that because he’d been a sickly child, my father never wished for more out of life than just to survive.

Back then, I never failed to see that as a feeble excuse for mediocrity.

It shames me that I ever thought such a thing. I can now see in a way I couldn’t while my father was alive that he did dream big. His goals weren’t money, power, or fame, however. What he wanted most was a family he loved—and having achieved that, he simply enjoyed it, rather than wanting more.

The old man in the mirror smiles at me. My father’s gray hair and large eyes have been there for some time, but now I can see the trace of his smile too. Mine has always seemed a little forced, and I never got that impression from his.

“You’re getting there,” I hear him say, imagining his hand resting on my shoulder.

“Trying,” I whisper back.

* * *

It’s fitting that Jessica is the first to arrive because I’ve known her the longest—fifty-seven years and two months, to be exact. I don’t recall the day we met, but the story goes that I took one look at her and demanded our parents give her away. Now we are the only family either of us still has besides spouses and kids, making me forever thankful that it was not up to me whether we kept her.

Jessica and I look remarkably alike, although in that curious way siblings sometimes do, we each favor a different parent. She has our mother’s flawless skin, perfect nose, and dark eyes, while I carry more of my father’s olive complexion and ethnic features. We both inherited his large mouth, which is our most defining feature. “A flip-top head,” we joked as kids, like Pez dispensers.

We embrace but don’t kiss, which has always been our adult greeting. Kevin and I do likewise, which lands a bit awkwardly because he’s taller than I am, even though I’m practiced in reaching up to hug men, thanks to my sons, who tower over me.

H.L. Mencken once said that the measure of wealth was making a dollar more than your brother-in-law. By that standard, I’m destitute. From the first time I met Kevin, he struck me as affable, and I thought he made a good match with my sister, but I never in a million years could have imagined he’d someday have a net worth rivaling the GDP of a small nation. I’m not entirely sure how he amassed his fortune beyond that one of his myriad businesses finally succeeded. I haven’t asked more deeply, fearing it would make me feel even worse about my own career.

My sister and I exchange status reports on our children, and I learn that Jack might be on the outs with his girlfriend, and that Molly doesn’t have a boyfriend, which Jessica expresses in a way that sounds like I imagine our mother would have. I don’t doubt that when I share that Jacob is thinking about applying to law school and Daniel just got a promotion, she’s thinking the same thing about me and our father.

Kevin excuses himself to get my sister a drink. Jessica and I aren’t alone for ten seconds before she says, “Sixty, huh. You’re old enough to cut the challah now.”

The reference is to a request she made a decade earlier that I do the blessing traditionally performed by the oldest male relative at Molly’s bat-mitzvah. I don’t think Jessica thought much of it, and she was visibly surprised when I declined on the grounds that it was an old-man job.

“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s an honor.”
“The way a lifetime achievement award is an honor,” I said. “It sends a clear

message nothing else is expected of you in the future.”

Kevin’s uncle ended up doing the blessing. Still, Jessica is right: the next time I’m asked, I’ll have no cause to decline.

“Mommy and Daddy would be proud of you,” she adds.

We have always referred to our parents with the diminutive. I don’t know why — maybe because it makes us feel like they’re still with us.

“You think?” I say, which sounds needier than I’d imagined.
“No. I know.” She smiles, that gigantic grin she’s had since she was a baby. “How

could they not be?”

She means it rhetorically, but the question hangs in the air, daring me to tick off all the ways our parents would be disappointed in me. As close as we are, I’ve never shared with my sister that, more often than not, I feel something of a failure.

For the first half of my life, I was a golden boy, at least in the things that mattered to me: school and having a bright future. The best grades, the best schools, the best jobs. But whereas I’d once been on the fast track, now I’m on no track at all. I’m a partner at a small law firm, but in name only. I’m not paid a salary; my compensation derives from a small percentage of the billings the firm collects from my work. Last year, that netted me less than I earned my first year out of law school.

Sarah’s career long ago eclipsed mine and funds our life. The mortgage, the kids’ tuition, our vacations all run on her credit card. I pay only for dining, and I suspect Sarah suggested that arrangement to spare me the humiliation of her picking up the check.

I’m usually honest with my friends, and Jessica likes to say we have no secrets, sharing a warts and all description of our marriages and children as an antidote to the rose-colored way most people portray those things. But I haven’t told anyone about my downward slide professionally, which reveals just how much shame I feel about it.

So, rather than come clean, I nod to accept Jessica’s appraisal of our parents’ posthumous judgment, just as Kevin returns to hand her a flute of champagne. We toast to my birthday, and while the three of us continue talking, I keep one eye on the door, watching the other guests trickle in.

The G-men arrive together, without their spouses, as they’d already said they would, joking that they like each other more anyway. Lisa and Eric are talking with Sarah, which makes sense because they’ve always been her favorite of my friends. Only Matt and my sons have yet to appear, which is also on brand — Matt because he loves a dramatic entrance, and the twins because they’re always running late.

After a few more minutes, I excuse myself to mingle. As I step away, Jessica takes hold

of my wrist, momentarily holding me in place.

“Really proud,” she says, and when she lets go of me, she flashes that gigantic smile of

hers.

* * *

No surprise, Greg and George are holding Heinekens, having passed on the specialty cocktail the bartender is pushing, which they likely find effeminate. Standing there, they remind me a little of the character in Godfather II complaining “Canapés my ass -- that’s chopped liver on a Ritz cracker.”

The G-men inhabit a different world than the rest of us. Sarah went to private school and didn’t encounter anyone not of means until college—and even then, the people she knew well were like her. I don’t think she’s ever met anyone socially who didn’t attend college other than Greg and George. And though the town I grew up in was much more diverse, the world I inhabit now is not.

I suspect that I’d find their political views abhorrent if they were honest about them, and that they’d consider mine surprisingly uninformed for someone they thought was so smart. Sometimes it’s difficult to square that circle. Jacob’s sexual preference is known to them, and they never voiced anything but support, but when referring to others they sometimes use pejoratives that the world, or at least the one I live in, have long banished.

They’re both a few months older than me, less than a month apart from each other. This year, in between their birthdays, I met them at this bar we all used to go to when we were in high school which hadn’t changed much since then, to mark their crossing the threshold I’m now celebrating.

Out of nowhere, Greg said, “I give myself a C for career, you know, middle of the pack. My health I would have said solid B, just a little bit of high blood pressure, but I’ve recently been suffering from this back pain that the doctors say is sciatica, but I just call it a motherfucker, so that drops me to a B-. But my family -- Carrie and my kids -- I’m in A+ territory there. So, what does that average out to? Do I make honor society, you think?”

“Valedictorian,” I said, and touched my beer against his.

George snorted. “I think my GPA goes the other way. Work is going great, doctor says I’m healthy as a horse, but – well, divorced -- and my kids, swear to God, they’re going to drive me to an early grave.”

The G-men then turned to hear my self-appraisal. A better man would have given them the truth, as I think they both had. And although I truthfully told them that my health and family were excellent, I slide back into my charade when I said I really couldn’t complain about how my career was going, even though I do so mightily.

Tonight, the G-men are underdressed for a party, the only people in jeans, although Greg, at least, has worn a shirt with a collar, but I wouldn’t have expected anything else. Sometimes I think they play that working class hero thing up for my benefit.

I hug them both – bro style, like football opponents after the game. Without any lead-in, George says, “So, you’ll never guess, who I ran into the other day.”

I look to Greg for a tell, and although he’s smiling that this is going to be good, that doesn’t narrow down my choices much. “Scarlett Johansson,” I say, because she pops into my head as the most beautiful woman I can think of.

“Not too far off,” Greg says, but doesn’t reveal more.

“Barbara Romatowski,” George says, looking proud for some reason. “She moved back to East Carlisle after her divorce and is living over in that apartment complex where the movie theater used to be. Anyway, I’m telling her about me, you know, trying to sound like I’m still all that, hoping maybe we can do a greatest hits kind of thing, and I’m getting nowhere. I mean, ice in fucking winter. But then she smiles at me and says, so what’s your friend Adam up to these days?”

Barbara Romatowski was the it girl of East Carlisle High School, class of 1984. I would bet a pretty penny that there wasn’t a single person in our entire high school that didn’t know her and would have gone double or nothing that she didn’t know me.

She knew George and Greg. Like George said, he was all that in high school, and Greg was right there with him on the popularity ladder. They were both tall and handsome and athletic. They kept me around back then even though I wasn’t any of those things because we’d always been friends, and they were loyal like that. But when I spent time with them during those years, I didn’t feel too different from the guy who wore the Bear costume at the football games – allowed on the team bus but not part of the team.

“What did she say?” I ask, amused, but also curious.

“I’d tell you, George says with a grin, “but I don’t want to break up your happy family.”

I half expect him or Greg to follow up with a “Psyche,” like they did when we were kids, but he clicks his beer bottle against Greg’s instead. I feel the same mix of admiration and exasperation I always do in their company. They’ve changed, of course, but not in ways that matter.

* * *

By nine it feels like a party. Everyone’s loosened up, laughter and chatter drowning out the Apple Music as it plays songs from the 70s. This was Sarah’s selection -- even though I’m more of a child of the 80s – and I have a sneaking suspicion she moved back a decade to drive home the point that I’m six years older. Still, every song sparks a memory, more often than not one that I share with someone in this room: the G-men correcting me that Only the Good Die Young was about sex, when I thought it was about a gang leader (“You may have heard I run with a dangerous crowd . . .”). Jessica belting out Donna Summer’s Bad Girls, holding a hairbrush as it if were a microphone with as much attitude as a thirteen-year-old can muster. Even the one-hit wonder Paper Lace’s The Night Chicago Died, brings back memories of a car trip my family took to Colonial Williamsburg when I was in the third grade.

I make my way over to Lisa and her husband, Eric. When we met, Lisa and I both marveled at how we’d lived almost parallel lives to that point: I went to Harvard, she to Yale; we switched for law school; we both then did judicial clerkships —me in New York, her in L.A.— until our paths finally crossed at Cromwell Altman.

From day one, I wanted to make partner. When I told Lisa that was my goal, she laughed.

“Big firms are like a giant swimming pool,” she said. “The weakest drown. The strongest

get out. All making partner proves is that you can keep your head above water for ten years.”

She left after three, used her bonus to pay off her student loans, and went in-house at a start-up that paid half her Cromwell Altman salary, but promised a better work-life balance. Now she’s chief legal officer of a company whose app is probably on your phone. I, meanwhile, kept treading for a decade -- keeping afloat, but not really getting anywhere -- until the partners pushed me under for good when they told me I wouldn’t make partner.

Although Lisa is my newest friend – a funny thing to say about someone I’ve known for thirty plus years -- she’s also my closest. With her, it’s family talk more than nostalgia or nonsense, which tends to be how the G-men, and even Matt and I, usually spend our time together. She and Eric have three boys: Conrad, a PhD candidate at Stanford; Mitchell, following her to Harvard Law; and Jason, the Dartmouth undergrad, whom she describes as a free spirit, which in her family only means he might not be in a position to change the world until after he’s turned thirty.

“We took the red-eye last night because I thought I’d sleep, which normally I can,” Lisa says, “but I’m running on fumes at this point. So, long way of saying, don’t be insulted if we do the Irish goodbye at some point.”

She and Eric live in San Francisco now. I’d half-expected her to send regrets. I’m very glad that she didn’t, even though, like me, she knows there won’t be much time to really talk tonight.

Eric stands mutely beside her, looking on the way the Vice-President does when the President speaks. I would have never imagined him as Lisa’s chosen one, always figuring she’d marry some Master of the Universe. Eric had some type of cog in the machine job when I met him, which he quit after Conrad was born, and has been a stay-at-home dad ever since, even though now there’s no one at home.

My mistake was thinking that our parallel paths made Lisa and me alike, but time has shown I couldn’t have been more wrong. Unlike me, she wasn’t collecting honors to impress others; her life choices were made for her alone.

That’s what I admire most about Lisa—she knows who she is. And that impresses me more than anything about her because it’s the one similarity we’ve never shared.

* * *

When Matt finally makes his grand entrance, the entire room shifts. By now I’m used to it. Everything, everywhere, has always seemed to yield to him.

Matt has lived the life I would have predicted back in college. There was something single-minded about him from the start; it wasn’t that I was confident he’d achieve his goals, but I couldn’t imagine what his life would look like if he didn’t. Even then, though he was probably the poorest among us, he carried himself like a CEO in waiting.

He runs some type of political dark money enterprise. It pays well, but he doesn’t have Kevin kind-of-money, and I suspect Lisa earns twice what he does. But Matt would likely do the job for free because it affords him access to people and places that seem almost Zelig-like. Over the years he’s spent the night in the palace of a Middle Eastern prince, eaten dinner at the White House, and been on the field when the Eagles hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy—all without leaving an internet footprint.

Deborah is his third wife, and she fits the cliché: each of Matt’s brides has been younger and more beautiful than the last. He’s never had children, which I know was his choice—and the reason for his first divorce, and maybe his second, although infidelity was the stated cause of that one.

Matt hugs me and plants a kiss on my cheek—a recent addition to our greeting and departure gesture. When we separate, he raises his drink – which dollars to donuts is the most expensive scotch the bartender had -- and says, “To the man, the myth, the legend,” by which I assume he means me, though he could just as easily be toasting himself.

After we clink glasses and each seal the sentiment with a sip, I thank Matt and Deborah for coming. He laughs, saying he considers it reconnaissance for his own sixtieth, which is six months from now.

“You want to hold yours at my place?” I ask, knowing it’s a preposterous suggestion. A His will almost certainly be a spare-no-expense operation in an over-the-top locale.

Going along with the joke, he scans my apartment. Despite our closeness—and my twenty years living here—I don’t think he’s never been inside. When he’s in town, he checks into the St. Regis, and we meet at restaurants I can scarcely afford—which is just as well, because I couldn’t get in even if I could.

“Thanks for the offer, but I was thinking maybe the Sands in Macau,” he says.
“Not Mars?” I say.
“Hmm. Let me talk to Elon about whether that’s doable.”

Matt has never gotten to know Sarah, and I haven’t invested in his spouses after his first marriage ended. He rarely asks about my kids, and sometimes I wonder if he even knows their names. But our friendship has never been about the other people in our lives. Instead, we’ve always existed in our own ecosystem. Although Sarah is the person I’m closest to, I think I’ve always occupied that space for Matt. To matter that way makes my heart swell. For my part, I have more fun in Matt’s company than with anyone else. More than once, Sarah has noted that I don’t laugh the same way as I do with him.

* * *

Sarah sidles up and kisses Matt on the cheek. I know he isn’t her favorite, and Deborah’s dress—cut low enough to draw attention—probably doesn’t help.

“I need to steal the birthday boy for a moment,” she says.

“If you must,” Matt replies, offering a subtle bow, as if he’s making a sacrifice for king and country.

We find a corner of the room. While not private, we’re far enough from our guest that we will not to be overheard if Sarah whispers, which she does. “I just texted with the boys. They’re on their way. After they arrive, it’ll be time for toasts.”

I feel a flutter of regret that my speech isn’t better. Then again, what I’m going to say doesn’t really matter. The people in this room already know what they mean to me.

* * *

Jacob and Daniel arrive together. There are some twins that people can’t even imagine are brothers and others who seem like they wouldn’t exist without the other. Ours are the latter. Not out of any physical resemblance – there they couldn’t be more different. Dan is tall in a way that defies logic in our family, but in a kind of poetry, he looks up to his shorter twin. That’s because Jacob has a breezy way about him that Dan hasn’t quite been able to master. When they were applying to college, one of the school’s they both applied to have had the essay prompt to write about a time they’d overcome adversity. Dan had half a dozen ideas of ways that the world had wronged him and he’d fought back; Jacob couldn’t think of a single time things hadn’t gone his way.

Sarah is on them like white on rice. After they exchange a few words, and she allows them time to get a glass of champagne with which to toast, she turns down the music with a touch of her phone.

“Everyone. Everyone can I have your attention for a moment.” It takes a few seconds, but the room eventually quiets. “It’s now time for those who know our guest of honor best to share our reflections. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve managed to keep from the birthday boy that I’ve asked each of you to share a single anecdote involving you and my husband, and challenged you to come up with one that was not only meaningful to you, but which you think he might not even remember.”

I smile at the rules, which are quintessential Sarah. When she reminisces, it’s rarely about weddings or graduations or other life events. Rather, she holds closest things that haven’t made any impression on me. My first reaction in those moments is to wonder why she even found it significant. Then, when I think about it more, I can’t believe that I hadn’t.

“Jessica, you’ve known him the longest,” Sarah says, “so you have the honor of starting us off.”

My sister nods and turns to Kevin who retrieves a few index cards from his jacket pocket, as well as Jessica’s reading glasses. “I’m not sure I followed the assignment correctly – and I’m a former teacher, so I should know better,” she says with a chuckle, that I know hides a bit of nerves. “It’s very possible that my brother remembers this, but it was the first thing that came to my mind, so I thought it was worth sharing.” She looks at me and smiles, and in that moment I’m reminded of how people always said our mother was beautiful, and although I couldn’t then see it, looking at my sister, it’s now impossible to deny.

“It’s my freshman year in college and I’m crying because I just found out that my high school boyfriend is going to the prom with one of my friends.” Jessica begins. “Adam rightly tells me that I’m the one who dumped the boyfriend in question, and anyway that was six months ago. To which I reply that it isn’t crazy for me not to want him to move on so quickly, like we were nothing.” She looks up from her notes. “Adam, do you remember what you said?”

I shake my head that I do not so that my sister’s story falls within Sarah’s parameters, but I do. I remember it because it felt in that moment like my sister and I had become friends, when I hadn’t recall feeling that way previously, although people had said it would come.

“You said that when you read a book or see a movie that’s really good, you don’t want to see it again, but you do want other people to have that experience. And that relationships should be like that too.”

There’s a collective Awww, and I cross the room to hug my sister. When I turn back to the party, I instinctively look at the G-men, because they would come next in order of seniority.

George gets the message because he says, “I guess it’s our turn now.”

“And believe it or not,” Greg adds, “we’re both doing different ones because we couldn’t agree.”

“So mine,” George says, “goes back to when we were kids. I can’t remember what I did, but I pissed off my parents—no surprise there—and this time my punishment was brutal: I wasn’t allowed to go on the sixth-grade trip to Great Adventure, which was elementary school graduation thing that we couldn’t stop talking about since . . . forever. Anyway, I’m sitting home the day of the trip, sulking and imagining everybody having the best time on the bus – not even at the park yet, but I’m jealous of them on the bus -- and then who shows up at my door – none other than Adam and Greg.

“They tell me that got this got this idea to turn my house into an amusement park that’s better than Great Adventure. And—sorry, Greg, you’re my boy—but I knew this was 100% Adam’s idea. We go yank the mattresses off the beds, line the stairs with them, pile every pillow we can find at the bottom, and spend the whole afternoon launching ourselves down like lunatics.

“At the end of the day, I told them both thanks. And Adam just shrugged and said, ‘Wouldn’t have been any fun without you, man.’”

George lifts his beer. “Love you, man.” While everyone drinks in toast, George adds, “But here’s the best part. It rained so fucking hard that everybody on the trip got drenched and they left early.”

There’s laughter at the quick turn away from sentimentality, and while it’s still going Greg says, “Told you I should have gone first, because that’s a tough act to follow.”

He shakes his head, clears his throat, then takes a deep breath. Greg’s the kind of guy who can hold court with ten guys at a bar, but tell him he’s got to make a speech in a living room and he looks terrified. The fact that he didn’t just slide in next to George and claim it as a joint story already says a lot. I feel bad he felt the pressure to step up at all, and a part of me wants to throw in the towel, like a protective manager not wanting to see his fighter get hurt. But I know that would be worse, so as Greg gathers the courage to begin, I can feel my heart rate increase as if I’m just as nervous as he must be.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I’m not going all the way back to our childhood. This was a few years ago—before Covid, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, I was working at this place I will not name, with this flaming asshole for a boss. And look, I served in the military, so it’s not like I haven’t had tough bosses. But for some reason, this guy got under my skin. Swear to God, there were days I wanted to just ---”

Greg punches his fist into his open hand, making a smack. He’s always had a temper and more than once in our adulthood he’s taken a swing at someone. He swears it’s only been in self-defense, but alcohol was always involved, so who really knows.

“Anyway, one day Adam and I were at the Grove, just the two of us, which is a little weird when I think about it because George isn’t there. Don’t know where you were, man. Bathroom, sick, whatever. Anyway, I’m unloading about my prick of a boss, and here’s the thing about Adam, he knows when to shut the fuck up. So he lets me go on and one without interruption. When I finally stop, he doesn’t say anything. He’s just thinking. You know the way Adam gets when you can kind of see the wheels turning inside his head. But what he can say, right? He doesn’t know my dickwad of a boss. I gotta say, I don’t even think Adam knows what I do for work, really. But then he says, ‘Look, Greg, this guy should one hundred percent suffer with ass cancer or something, the sooner the better, but that’s outside of your skill set. You can only do you. So, I don’t know if this is going to mean anything to you, but when somebody’s on my case, I ask myself: would I do it the same way again? If the answer’s no, then it’s valid criticism—and it tells me I got to do better the next time. But if the answer is yes, then I say – fuck him and move on.’”

Greg smiles with a sense of relief that he’s almost done. “And what stuck with me,” he says,” a lot more than the advice, if I’m telling the truth, is that I couldn’t imagine anyone thinking Adam ever screwed up at work. The guy never got an answer wrong once in school. And that’s the part that helped. Not the advice—though, thank you for that—but knowing that even you got your ass handed to you at work sometimes made me realize that I’m not a screw up because I know that there’s no way that Adam’s a screwup.”

He pauses a beat, as if to let that sink in. “Happy birthday, my man.”

While people are still clapping, Matt smacks his hands together more loudly to signal that the floor is now his. “Alrighty,” he says, like he’s a stand-up about to do his tight five. The transition from Greg to him is jarring; Greg was all fidget and nervous ticks, but Matt was born for the spotlight.

“When Adam was going to propose to Sarah, he asked me for my advice. Not about marriage – he’s too smart for that – but about buying a diamond, because he figured I’d know people to get him a good deal. And if there’s anything our guest of honor likes, it’s a good deal.”

I note the nods of agreement. My frugality apparently is a through line that connects me to friends from different eras and walks of life.

“And, of course, I give him my guy’s information,” Matt continues. “But then I say to him, ‘Adam, why do you want to get married? You’re not even thirty years old. There’s a lot of life out there still to be lived.’ And he says to me, ‘This is what living life looks like, my friend, being with the person I love for the rest of my life.’”

Matt’s face takes on a caste I’m certain he thinks makes him look contemplative. Then he shakes his head, trying now to look solemn.

“I didn’t get that for the longest time, but now I do.”

He says this last part staring not at me, but Deborah. It’s like Matt to make his toast of me about himself, but he wouldn’t be him if it had gone any other way.

“Cent anni,” he says, even though he’s not Italian.

Then Matt steps forward and bear hugs me, planting another kiss on my cheek.

When I’m out from under Matt’s embrace I see that Lisa has taken a step forward. She waits until she has my attention – as if I’m a judge she’s about to address – and when I nod, she begins.

“Mine is the best piece of advice I’ve received from anyone. I had an offer from this fintech company, and I was thinking about whether it was the right career move for me to leave Cromwell Altman, which is where Adam and I met. And me, being me, I’m making lists of pros and cons. Adam took one look at my spreadsheet and in his very matter-of-fact way – like he was the voice of reason – he said it was impossible to project out any more than 2 to 3 years because beyond that, it’s always going to be a crapshoot. So, the question I should be asking myself, he says, is not where each path will lead me in 10 or 20 years, which was the way I was thinking about it, but which one is going to bring me more happiness in the much shorter term. Once I thought about it in those terms, it was a no brainer.” She smiles and adds, “In our family, we call that the Adam Doctrine. I’ve followed it ever since, and I advise each of you to look upon that as the north star to govern your own life decisions.”

If we were following the stated order, Sarah would go next because the boys came into my life after her. But, of course, Sarah is going to go last, and when the twins don’t realize this on their own, she says, “You’re up, Jacob and Daniel.”

“Oh,” says Jacob, “right. Sorry.”

He looks at his twin, and Daniel nods, a cue that he should continue. He removes from his pocket a crumpled piece of paper and begins to read: “Unlike Uncle George and Uncle Greg, Dan and I are going to do ours together. But when we thought about ours, we realized that we had a million to choose from because we have never forgotten a single thing that our father has ever said to us.”

Jacob’s eyeroll is a beat after Daniel’s smile. I knew he was being sarcastic during the set-up, because my sons are smart-asses to their core.

“The one we picked was this one time when Dad took us fishing,” Jacob continues. “When we get on the boat, I say that I really wanted to catch a lot of fish, and Dan said he wanted to catch a really big fish. And Dad said – you know boys, they call it fishing and not catching fish for a reason.”

Jacob hands the paper over to Daniel. It’s his turn now.

“Neither one of us knew what Dad was talking about because Jake and I thought that the only reason to go fishing is to catch fish. And neither one of us can remember if we caught anything that day. Fast forward to a couple of years ago, when Jacob and I went to Cancun with our college friends during Spring break, and we all went fishing. One of our friends says that he’s hoping we catch enough fish for dinner, and at exactly the same time, Jake and I say– You know, they call it fishing, and not catching fish for a reason.”

Jacob bows to signify the story is over, and Daniel says, “We know what you mean now, Dad. Love you,” which prompts his brother to say, “Yeah, me too – love you.”

I take both boys into my arms. It’s one of Jake’s things that he likes to kiss the top of my head when we embrace, the way I once did to him when he was much shorter than me. Daniel isn’t quite that tall, and he usually seems more embarrassed by PDA anyway.

“That leaves me,” Sarah says beside me. “And I’ll let you in on a little secret. I picked this topic – things Adam said that we take to heart and he’s forgotten – because, like my sons, I take everything my husband says to heart, and I don’t think Adam remembers half the things he tells me ten seconds after he says them.”

She laughs at her own joke, and the others join in. I want to say that it isn’t true, but heckling your wife is never a good look, so I just smile.

“On the occasion of completing his sixtieth trip around the sun, I decided to share the very first thing Adam ever said to me that made me think, This is a man I really want to know better.”

She may have won her own game – which is not that out of character for Sarah. I truly don’t remember saying anything that might fit her set-up.

“We were on our first date,” she continues. “We went to this Italian restaurant that’s kind of a glorified pizza place over on 73^rd and 1^st Avenue, that’s still there and we return every year for our the anniversary. After we’d gone through the How many brothers and sisters do you have, and the Where did you go to college, we were on to our favorites – books, movies, music. And that’s when Adam tells me that his favorite movie of all time is Batman, the Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson one that had come out a few years earlier. Without missing a beat, I replied that I liked Superman better. Swear to God, Adam looked at me like I’d said the earth was flat. So, I asked him – ‘What’s so good about Batman?’

“Adam straightened up, you know the way he does sometimes, when he’s really focused. And he’s looking at me in this way that, I swear, I thought he was going to share some top-secret military information. But what he actually says is: ‘Batman’s disguise is being Bruce Wayne. Clark Kent… that’s who Superman really is.’ And I nod like that’s really interesting – even though I’d actually heard that somewhere before. But Adam, he’s not done. Because then he says, ‘Being Superman, that’s just Clark Kent’s job – which he’s doing because he feels like he’s got to so his dead Kryptonian parents will be proud of him, because that’s why they sent him to earth in the first place.’ Then Adam gives me that smile he has – you know the one – right before he says something that he thinks is going to be so clever. And then he says, “But Batman uses the money he inherited from his parents in a way that would make them roll over in their graves. So, that’s the difference, really. Superman is your classic parental pleaser, but Batman, he does what he wants.’”

I’m still thinking that maybe there will be more, something more heartfelt, but then she raises her champagne flute, I know that she’s done. “To Adam,” she says.

* * *

I’m not the gifted storyteller Lisa is, nor do I crave the spotlight like Matt, and I suspect more is expected of me than Greg and George, or the twins for that matter. But now that it’s my turn to speak, I realize that my prepared remarks were overly formal and what is needed is something more heartfelt.

“Wow,” I say. “And I mean that. Just wow. Thank you all for that. Truly.” I pause for a moment, taking in the faces I’ve known for my entire life, as if seeking their sustenance to enable me to put into words the things I want to say. “When Sarah said that we had to include on the invitation that no one was to bring gifts, I was very upset.” My friends laugh, for which I’m grateful because I feared that they might think I was being serious. “But here she went and made sure you actually gave me the greatest gift of all. Don’t get me wrong -- I didn’t need a reminder of how much you all mean to me -- but I’m never going to turn down being told that maybe I mean something to each of you too.”

I’m not an overly sentimental man. I don’t cry at movies, weddings or funerals. But I can feel myself begin to choke up. I don’t want emotion to overtake me, so rather than extemporize, I decide to bring my remarks to a conclusion.

“Sixty hits a little hard, not going to lie. And it makes you think about your life a little too. As you all know, I have always lived by a simple credo: that what makes a man is being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost.” I pause to set up the punch line. “Well, that and a pair of testicles.”

That part was in my original script. In response, Matt calls out, “The Dude abides,” because he gets the movie reference.

Then I go back to speaking off-the-cuff. “But what I’ve come to realize in my old age is that what actually makes a man is the company he keeps. The friends he’s made and managed to maintain through time and distance. The people he loves and those that for some mysterious reason, love him. And by that measure, I am the manliest man in all of Manville. I love you all. And Sarah . . . I love you most of all.”

* * *

Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Chef Paul’s work is well received, and the drinks flow, which never hurts when it comes to having a good time at a party.

My boys leave at ten. They have plans with their friends that we promised them they could keep. I continue to make the rounds, in and out of different discussion circles. Sometimes I watch my friends – who aside from the G-men, don’t know each other – intermix. I imagine Matt trying to hit Kevin up for a donation; Lisa trying to explain to George what her company does; Sarah and Greg talking about God knows what.

At some point, without my noticing, the clock struck midnight. I’ve officially become a sexagenarian. When I realize that I’ve crossed the threshold that for so long loomed aspirational, I take a deep, cleansing breath. I don’t feel any different I tell myself, and yet I’m not entirely sure that’s actually right.

Lisa and Eric say their goodbyes shortly after. Not the Irish goodbye she’d predicted, but a big hug and a promise for us to get together soon – either in San Francisco or New York or anywhere else I choose, she says. Their departure signals to the others that it’s time for them to go, and a queue begins to form at our door. Like a state dinner receiving line, one-by-one my friends kiss Sarah on the cheek, she hands them their parting gift, and then they embrace me and say that they had a wonderful time.

When the door shuts behind the last of our guests, it is my turn to thank Sarah for a wonderful evening. She smiles and says that I’m more then welcome, and asks me to confirm that it was a good party, which I readily – and honestly – do.

“Go get ready for bed. I’ll deal with Chef Paul and Bartender Pete,” she says. “I’m not going to do any clean-up tonight. Everything can wait until morning, so I’ll be in very soon.”

* * *

I’m in bed, teeth brushed, pajamas on, when Sarah makes her way back into our bedroom. I’ve heard the front door close a minute before, so I know the house is once again just ours.

In her hand is one of the gifts that was sitting in the basket. I hadn’t noticed that someone had forgotten theirs on their way out.

“Who’d we miss?” I say.

“No one,” she replies. “It’s for you.”

She doesn’t hand it to me, but instead proceeds to undress and put on her pajamas. As she does, I say, “I thought this was a no gifts situation.”

“If you don’t want it –” she says.

“I didn’t say that.”

She’s still holding the bag when she peels back the covers to join me in bed. Once she’s situated, she hands it over.

I expect it’s the same party favor we gave the others: a silver frame with a photograph Sarah has selected, most likely one of the four of us, or just her and me. But when I tear off the paper and open the box I smile because I should have known that Sarah wouldn’t be that predictable. And it explains why she’d opted for humor over sentiment in her speech – she wanted to tell me what our life means to her away from the others. A gift that’s for me and me alone.

It’s a hand-written note -- just a few lines -- but what it says brings me to the verge of tears.

While I’m reading it for the second time, she says, “Don’t ever forget that.”

“I never will,” I reply. “Promise.”

Then she kisses me. It’s that one.

Before the internet made every fact instantly knowable, I would have sworn the mercury went well past ninety. Thanks to Google, I know it topped out at 86°F. I have a hard time believing that, but it’s on the internet, so it must be true.

I hadn’t returned home for my college Spring break by choice, but because my parents wouldn’t finance a trip to Cancun that my friends were going on. All that might have been for the best because I was way behind on my senior thesis. I’d done all of the research, but hadn’t written a word. My thesis advisor had been pretty adamant about seeing something when I returned.

Our house looks like all the other houses in our neighborhood. Neither the plot of land nor the structure on it were large or small. The furniture was nice, but not fancy, acquired by my parents piecemeal throughout their adulthood. The dining room set was older than me, but they’d purchased the living room sofa after my sister graduated from college, which was the only year during the Reagan administration they didn’t have to pay a tuition.

I’m not sure that our socio-economic situation factors much into what happened that week, but it might. I think what transpired is far more about my father than our finances, but I suppose that’s for you to decide after I’ve laid it all out. But what’s important to get out to give you some context about this is two things: we were pretty comfortable middle class and my mother once told me that my grandparents had placed my father in an orphanage for two years because they didn’t have enough money to feed him.

* * *

The first night I was home, my father grilled burgers. We ate outside on our deck, which was not something we often did because my mother complained about mosquitos “eating her alive,” never failing to mention that she believed it was because she had sweet skin (although she might have said sweet blood).

At dinner, my parents asked me about school, and I answered in the same way that I did during our weekly Sunday at five phone calls. My father barely spoke during those phone check-ins, other than to say hello at the outset to let me know he was on the line, and then to offer some platitude at the end – keep on keeping on if I was happy, or hang in there, you hear, if I wasn’t -- and I always thought he only chimed in at that point as a signal to my mother that the long-distance charges were piling up and so it was time to say goodbye.

After dinner, I adjourned to my bedroom, shut the door behind me, and pulled out a notepad to begin writing my thesis. I’m not so old that I didn’t write my college papers on a computer, but I am old enough that I didn’t own a computer in college. What I, and to be fair many of my classmates, did was write papers longhand and then type them into the computer, in much the same way I did my papers in high school for those teachers who required only typewritten submissions.

My thesis was about the Senate’s historical role in Supreme Court nominations, which was a hot topic because the year before, Robert Bork’s nomination had been rejected, and it had been twenty years since a nominee hadn’t been confirmed, and nearly a hundred since a nominee that was deemed qualified and not a racist had been voted down.

The window in my bedroom was already open as far as it went. I was glad that I didn’t have to open it because the desk was directly under the window, and to get sufficient leverage you needed to move the desk, which was no easy feat because it weighed a million pounds.

Sitting at my desk, the air from the outside coming into my room the window, I wrote the first line of my senior thesis: The Framers of the Constitution, those revered old men who had congregated in New York in 1779, thought that the President of the United States would always be someone like George Washington – a man (and yes, they thought the president would aways be a man) who was above partisan issues and represented the best interests of the entire country. How wrong they turned out to be.

I wrote most of the Framers’ part that night, which turned out to be about ten looseleaf pages. I usually averaged a two-to-one ratio when converted to type, so I thought it had been a decent night’s work. The last hour of which I had Saturday Night Live on in the background, and I stopped working altogether by the time Dennis Miller began Weekend Update.

* * *

On that first night I was home, I slept until close to eleven. When I made it downstairs, my father said, the “prodigal son returns,” and my mother said, “It’s going to be a really nice day today, you should do something outside.”

“I have to work on my thesis,” I said, even though I wasn’t really thinking I would turn to that until the after dinner.

And then a second thought occurred to me.

“Maybe I’ll go to the Smithsonian,” I said. “Could I have the car?”

My mother looked over to my father, who was still reading the Times. “Yeah. That’s fine with me,” he said, looking up from his paper “I have nothing planned for today.”

I had no intention of going to the Smithsonian. My plan was to use the car to visit my friend Tim who was at Georgetown, which had its break two weeks earlier. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell my parents that, as they probably would have let me take the care anyway, but back then I said what I needed to say to get what I wanted, and sometimes that didn’t comport with the truth.

Tim was a friend from high school. We’d both played on the basketball team, and took all the same advanced classes, so we were reasonably close.

We went to the Tombs, which was the real-life model for the bar in St. Elmo’s Fire. It was the place we used our fake IDs in high school, and then our real ones after that. Since the movie’s premier, the Tombs had become overrun by tourists, so some of our friends had gravitated to places that were still college bars, but apparently Tim wasn’t one of them.

I called my parents from a payphone at the Tombs and told them that I’d run into him at the Smithsonian and after I finished my work, we both decided to get a drink. Given that I might be drinking, I told them that I thought the responsible thing was for me to stay the night at Tim’s. I knew that was going to be an issue for them because we only had two cars, which meant one of my parents would have to drop off the other at work on Monday, but they said it was fine.

Some girls Tim knew joined us a few beers in. I thought I might get lucky, but it didn’t turn out to be that kind of a situation, and the girls went on their way at closing time, and Tim and I went back to his place.

The point being that I spent Sunday getting drunk and fell asleep on Tim’s floor. I woke up Monday morning hungover and now I was behind in my work.

* * *

No one was home, my parents were both at work. I took two aspirin, drank as much water as I could get down without puking, and got into my bed. I slept until close to two. There was some leftover brisket in the refrigerator and after I woke up, I took a decent helping of that and then two more aspirin. Then I took a shower.

I wasn’t sure if it was the aspirin, the nap, the shower or the food that helped ease my head, but by three I felt well enough to do some work. The moment I sat down at my desk, however, I realized it was too hot for me to concentrate. I wasn’t certain if it was the heat or my drinking the night before that made it that way.

The downstairs thermostat registered seven-five degrees. Given that the one thing I knew about hot air was that it rose – not to mention that my bedroom had a southern exposure -- I assumed that put my bedroom at close to eighty.

I clicked the air conditioner on, setting it to seventy-two.

That was the beginning of the end, as it turned out.

* * *

It took about an hour for me to feel the air conditioner’s effect, and by then I was writing up a storm. Three pages about John Rutledge’s rejection in 1795, a few more about Oliver Wolcott going down a quarter century later.

That led me to John Tyler, which I thought was a good stopping point for a while because for a guy who is largely forgotten by history, his Supreme Court nominations would probably account for twenty percent of my thesis because he’d gone one for nine in getting his Supreme Court nominees confirmed.

By then it was a little after five. I decided to make good use of the fact that I didn’t have to get permission to use the car and drove out the mall.

Even before I got there, I figured there was a decent chance I’d see someone I went to high school with, and sure enough I ran into to Bonnie Sugarman at the hot pretzel place. She was on break from UVA, and we talked a little bit about our future plans. She was going to law school, but still wasn’t sure where. I told her that I had a job at Goldman Sachs lined up for fall, and she said, “Cool,” but didn’t seem that impressed.

I got home at around seven, which I thought was fine because we usually ate dinner around seven, but my parents were sitting at the table and from the little food still on their plates, it seemed clear that they were done eating. To be fair, it’s possible that I got to the house a little later than seven.

They looked pissed. Or at least my father did. He had that rigid jaw and narrow eyes that he’d get when he was angry.

“What?” I said.

I wasn’t being a smartass. Then again, maybe I was because I assumed he was pissed was because I’d made them carpool.

“You really have no idea?” my father said.

“No . . .” I said as if I didn’t.

“What’s today’s date, Adam?”

“Monday,” I said.

“Not the day of the week,” my father said. “The date.”

I didn’t know. I was on Spring break. The date was meaningless.

“April . . . twenty-first,” he said, like that should mean something.

“Okay,” I said.

That obviously wasn’t the right response. His eyes grew narrower, and his jaw became even more rigid than before.

“There’s no reason for the air conditioner to be on when its April 21^st, now is there?”

I had no earthly idea what the date had to do with the air conditioner. I did know that my best play was to keep my mouth shut, though.

“Do you know how much it costs to run the air conditioner?” he asked.

My father might have legitimately expected me to know the date, but there was no way he could have thought I had the first clue regarding the cost of running our air conditioner.

“No,” I said with a shrug.

“A lot,” he said, which suggested he didn’t know either.

I might have smirked a bit, but probably not, because my father’s eyes didn’t become narrower or his jaw more rigid, although that might have been more because he’d already maxed out on both.

“Okay,” I said, feeling as if that was non-committal enough not to get me into trouble.

“No, not okay, Adam,” he said. “For the remainer of your time here, you are not to touch that thermostat. Do you understand?”

I wasn’t sure that punishment was proportionate to the crime, but there was no court of appeal from his sentence, so I said, “Okay. Sorry. I didn’t know.”

* * *

The first thing I recognized when I returned to my room was that the window was shut. My father had probably done that when he saw the air conditioner was on to keep the cold air trapped inside. I could only imagine how angry he’d been when he realized that I’d not only committed the capital offense of air conditioner before Memorial Day, but left every window in the house wide open. My father had said many times that doing that was like air-conditioning the entire neighborhood.

I tried to raise the window, but it was impossible to get the leverage necessary on account of the desk. Equally beyond my strength was moving the desk so that I could open the window because it was a million pounds. I’m certain that my father would have come to my aid, but that would have required calling attention to my helplessness without him, not to mention that I couldn’t rule out it would have triggered another round of discussion about my irresponsibility with the amount of household income allotted to air conditioning.

One of my mother’s go-to expressions was that you shouldn’t cut off your nose to spite your face. Whenever she said it, I never failed to wince, thinking about the literal act of severing your nose. I never thought about the spiting your face part, but I knew from a young age that you shouldn’t do that.

I did it a lot, however. A case in point, that evening the window remained shut, and I kept my door closed out of principal, although I’m hard pressed to articulate the point of honor to which I was adhering. But I stayed true to that conviction even after I began sweating, and even after though I found it nearly impossible to sleep that way.

* * *

I would have sworn on a stack of bibles that the temperature on Tuesday exceeded ninety degrees. Even the living room, which was most comfortable space in the house because it had cross-ventilation, was stifling.

I gave some thought to why my father was so crazy about my using the air conditioner. Even if I didn’t know how much it cost to run the air conditioner, I knew it wasn’t going to send us to the poor house. Besides, if it wasn’t running the air conditioner, it was leaving the lights on in rooms we’d left, which was apparently another thing that prevented us from living in a mansion or owning a yacht. Or that summer I begged him for wayfarers (and yes, it was right after Risky Business came out), and he told me that they were too expensive, even though they were all of forty bucks. The trip to Cancun, which, granted, was a bigger ticket item, but I was willing to repay him for it (with interest!), and he still claimed we – by which he meant he – couldn’t afford it, even though he wasn’t even the one who was going to pay for it in the end.

The bottom line was something I’d known from an early age about my old man -- there were certain things he decided were not worth the money and therefore could not be had, and those rules had very little to do with the actual cost of the thing. Harvard was worth it. A Ralph Lauren polo was not. Air conditioner was worth it in about five weeks, and then only until Labor Day, but turning it on during a heat wave in April was a felony.

* * *

When my mother come home, I scurried back to my bedroom like a frightened kitten and shut my door. Even though I’d left the door open all day, with the window still shut it hardly mattered. My room was – pick your adjective – sweltering, boiling, scorching. I think the one that rolled around in my head at the time was hellish.

Still, I stayed there, sweating, until my mother came upstairs to check on me. The first words out of her mouth were, “Why do you have the door and window closed. Aren’t you warm?”

I could have explained my difficulty regarding opening the window. But I didn’t. Instead I said, “I thought Dad wants us all to suffer.”

She shook her head in disappointment. “Suit yourself,” she said, and then turned on her heels and left.

That night, I ate dinner in relative silence, even though my parents tried to engage me. My father didn’t seem angry anymore. His jaw was loose and his eyes full. He did once refer to my thesis as a paper, and when I corrected him it may have caused a slight jaw rigidity and eye narrowing, but I might be imagining that.

I swear to God that when I went back into my room, it had to be approaching triple digits. I don’t care what the internet says was the temperature on that date at that time in Fairfax County, it was at least one hundred in my room. Now, I can’t deny that my decision to keep the door shut as a matter of defiance contributed to that, but the fact that I was sitting in an actual sweatbox while trying to write my senior thesis that was due the following week is a hill I’m willing to die on.

* * *

This part I have never told another living person. Not even my wife. Certainly not my own children. So only those who witnessed it firsthand can dispute my account. That said, I will try my level best to faithfully narrate the events, even though I am well aware that they do not reflect well on me.

I’m not sure how long I sat in my bedroom sweating, but when I came downstairs my parents were no longer at the dining room table, so it had to be at least ten minutes. On the other hand, my mother was in the kitchen, undoubtedly cleaning up, so it was probably less than twenty.

My father was in the living room. He was reading. He smiled when he saw me approach. I cannot explain why, but that really upset me.

“For the love of God, Dad, you need to turn the air conditioner on,” I said.

“It’ll get cooler as the night goes on,” he said.

“But it’s a stifling hot now, and I can’t do any work.”

He smiled again, but this time it was the way you might at a dog doing a trick. Like he was amused and wondering what was going to come next.

I blame his response for what I said next.

“I know that you’d rather save a few dollars than not have me die of heat stroke, but my Harvard tuition is twenty grand and you’re pissing that away if I don’t hand in my thesis because I won’t graduate, which I won’t be able to finish because my room is hotter than the ninth circle of hell.”

My father nodded at this information, as if we considering my point. Then he said, “Thank you for that information. However, I’m well aware of how much I pay to provide for your education.”

In that moment, I knew that the cause and effect I’d just espoused was ridiculous. But having staked out that position, I saw no graceful retreat.

“Then turn on the goddam air conditioner,” I yelled.

He chuckled, which this time reminded me of the way you laugh at a child trying to catch bubbles in their hands when they break. Half laughing because it’s sweet that they’re trying, but also because they’re not yet smart enough to realize it’s a fool’s errand.

“Well, that’s certainly not the way to get me to change my mind,” he said. “If anything, that might just make me turn the heat on.”

I now believe that his comment was designed to – pardon the pun – lower the temperature between us, because he said it with a smile on his face. But I was past any point of reproachment, and his words pushed me over the edge.

“You can do whatever you want,” I said. “But I don’t have to sit here and take it.”

His jaw slacked and his eyes grew wide. “I’m almost certain that the Ritz Carlton in Tyson’s Corner is going to have availability, Adam. I’m very sorry that you can’t take the car because your mother and I have work tomorrow. But perhaps if you call them, they’ll send over a limousine. And my bet is that the driver will put the air conditioner on as high as your heart desires.”

I didn’t say what I said next right away, so I can’t hide behind the fact that it was out of reflex. I can say that the reason for the delay was because I knew I shouldn’t say it, and was telling myself not to say it, but I didn’t listen to my own counsel because the next thing I knew it was out there.

“I can’t fucking wait to be out of this house and away from you,” I said.

* * *

I didn’t give my father the opportunity to return fire, although I doubt he would have even if I’d stayed downstairs. He wasn’t a yeller. Truth of the matter, I’m not sure I ever heard him raise his voice. He also wasn’t one of those My house, my rules, guys, which I’ve often thought of as tin-pan dictator logic. But he was someone who expected respect and a certain amount of recognition on the part of his children that we were raised to know better.

Sometimes I wonder if I’d taken a different tack, perhaps apologized for my outburst or even started with a more rationale attempt to explain that it was warmer in my room than anywhere else (and not used words like stifling, and certainly not hotter than the ninth circle of hell), it would have made a difference. Truthfully, I don’t think so. He would have helped me open the window, of that I’m certain. But no air conditioner before Memorial Day was a hill he was willing to die on.

So, after uttering my exit line, I ran back to my room. And despite the fact that I’d just told my father that being in my room was akin to torture, I shut the door.

I expected him to engage me further. Not right away, but before he went to bed, at least. And I was determined to keep the door shut until he did.

For the next two hours, I sweated while waiting to hear a knock on my door. If not my father seeking to sue for peace, perhaps my mother engaging in some shuttle diplomacy. At one point I thought I’d just hear the air conditioner click on, which I would have viewed as an unconditional surrender.

At about nine, I considered opening the door, if only to allow a little bit of new air to circulate, but I held the line.

At ten, I decided I wouldn’t be magnanimous if my father or mother or the air conditioner did come.

At eleven, I figured they had gone to bed.

At midnight, I planned my counterattack.

* * *

It was still dark outside on Wednesday morning when I wheeled my suitcase through the front door. I climbed into the taxi I’d called the one time I exited my bedroom and said, “Union Station.”

About the time I was boarding the train back to Boston, my parents woke up. Perhaps they opened the door to my room to check on me, or maybe they didn’t. If they did, they would have seen a note on my bed. If they didn’t, they would have gone downstairs to find a note taped to the refrigerator.

The note on my bed said – See the note on the refrigerator.

The note on the refrigerator said Mom and Dad – and yes, I deliberately chose not to include the Dear -- I must prioritize my education over all else at this time, and that has caused me to decide to return to Harvard earlier than I had anticipated. I simply cannot do the work that is required of me – the work that you expect me to do – under conditions that are oppressive. I hope that you understand.

I never considered adding the closing salutation of love. I almost signed it Your Son in place of my name, however.

* * *

On Thursday, in the cold air conditioned comfort of the Harvard library, I wrote the rest of my thesis. At night, I went to my dorm room, which I should point out didn’t have air conditioning.

To my defense, the internet says it was about five degrees cooler in Cambridge than it was northern Virginia. Cutting against that was the fact that I kept my dorm door and window open at all times to make the room more comfortable.

* * *

My parents called me at the usual date and time. Neither of them said a word about my middle of the night departure half a week earlier. If you’d been on that call, you wouldn’t have thought anything out of the ordinary had happened while I’d been at home.

Although, of course, none of us really felt that way.

There were four more Sundays after that before graduation, and my parents called each one at five on the dot. In one of those calls I told them that I had finished and submitted my thesis. In another I mentioned that it had been awarded High Honors (without mentioning that my advisor said that if I’d gotten it into him earlier, allowing more time for revisions, I likely would have been in the running for one of the departmental prizes). In none was there any mention made of the air conditioner incident, as I’d started referring to it. If there had been a thousand Sunday calls to follow, I’m quite certain it wouldn’t have been mentioned in any of those either.

* * *

Harvard always holds its graduation on the first Thursday after Memorial Day. My parents arrived on campus on Wednesday morning. We had dinner that night at Legal Seafood. Not the flagship one, which was fully booked, but the one in the Chestnut Hill mall. My parents told me that I could get a lobster “because you only graduate college once,” but I ordered the fried seafood platter, which was the same thing as my sister had.

I cannot say my entrée choice was because of the air conditioner incident. But I also can’t say that it wasn’t.

Graduation day was a brightly sunny one. Most of the students wore sunglasses, including me, proudly donning the wayfarers I’d purchased with the money I’d earned as a camp counselor the summer after my freshman year.

By four it was all over. Several of my friends’ families were staying the night, but my parents’ plan had always been to leave right away, have a fast dinner when we dropped off my sister off in Manhattan, which my father estimated would be around eight, and then, assuming traffic was manageable, he was hoping we’d make it back to Fairfax at around midnight.

We ate quickly and made good time, but still didn’t pull into our driveway until after one. The house was very hot and every window was closed. However, before even bringing the suitcases upstairs, my father went to the thermostat and turned the air conditioning on.

It was now after Memorial Day, after all.

* * *

A week later, I took the train to Manhattan and stayed the night at my housemate’s Joel’s house. He was the richest of my friends, which I knew because he was always talking about rich stuff for which I had no real frame of reference. Like that the skiing in Aspen wasn’t as good as in Vail, but that the Aspen was the ritzier a town.

I didn’t know just how rich he was until that visit because I’d never been to his house before, but it was one of those places where the elevator opens inside the apartment. They had a balcony that ran the length of the apartment that overlooked Central Park, and when I referred to it as such, Joel said that it was a terrace, and that a balcony was the thing that jutted out of the building that was just barely large enough for a grill and a small table.

The next day we took a car service to JFK, where we met up with Greg and Michael, and the four of us landed in Rome on Monday morning to begin a backpacking excursion that had been my parents’ graduation.

I could tell you about that, about how we went north in Italy before heading over to Nice for the weekend, where we briefly considered staying for some extra time before deciding to stick to the plan so as to not worry our parents if they had to get in touch with us and we weren’t in the city we were supposed to be on the itinerary we’d circulated, and then spent several days in Paris. But that would side-track me from the bigger point, which is this: when we arrived in Barcelona and went to the American Express office there to see if we had any messages, which was something we’d each promised our parents we’d do every time we arrived in a new city, there was a message waiting for me.

That wasn’t surprising because I’d also gotten messages in Rome, Venice and Paris too. Always from my parents, and that really meant from my mother, although it was signed – but not really signed because it was transcribed by the person who worked in the American Express office – Mom and Dad.

In Rome, the message said that they loved me and wished me a great trip. In Venice, it was the same, but also that I should go to Harry’s Bar and have a bellini. In Paris, it was simply, l ’Amour. The other guys didn’t get messages from their parents, or at least they hadn’t yet, and they made fun of me for mine, but we did go to Harry’s Bar and have bellinis, and wouldn’t have known to do that but for my mother’s message.

In Barcelona, however, the message did not alert me to a tourist attraction that was not to be missed, or generally convey my parents’ good wishes. It read: Please call home ASAP. Collect is fine. Mom.

* * *

A few hours later, I was on a flight bound for JFK. Because of the time difference, I landed in New York about an hour or two after the local time of my departure from Barcelona. The first thing I did upon touching down was call my mother from a payphone. Collect again because I didn’t have any quarters.

“There’s been no change,” she told me. “So, I’m adhering to the no news is good news philosophy.”

While I’d been inflight, my sister had made her way down to Fairfax, and during my call from Penn Station, my mother said that Amy was currently in the hospital with our father. She added that it was lucky I’d reached her because she’d only come home to get some stuff she thought my father would like to have in his hospital room, although lucky wasn’t the word I would have used to describe my state of being.

During that first phone call, the one from Barcelona, my mother told me that my father had suffered a minor heart attack. In the years since, there has been some dispute about whether she’d said minor, but that’s not the kind of thing I could have possibly been mistaken about. She also told me that he was going to be fine, although here too she claims that she didn’t give me any sense of false hope.

We both agree that she said that I should come right home.

I pushed back, which shames me to this day. That’s one of the reasons I’m so certain she had characterized it as a minor heart attack, and that she had promised me that he would be fine. I like to believe that even the selfish, self-absorbed person I was back then would have dropped everything to see my father if I thought his condition was serious.

* * *

To meet some distribution requirement, I took a philosophy of science class my junior year. It was there that I learned about Schrodinger’s Cat, although I’d heard the term previously, and might have even used it myself, but without truly comprehending it. For those of you who fall into that category, Schrodinger’s Cat is a thought experiment that highlights the quantum mechanics theory that objects can exist in multiple states if they are unobserved.

In the example, you’re supposed to imagine a cat in a box that also contains a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter and a poison vial. When the atom decays, it will set off the Geiger counter, which will trigger the poison and kill the cat. But until you open the box, you don’t know if that has happened, and so the cat is presumed to be both alive and dead simultaneously.

I say all this because that’s the best way I can explain what it’s like to be on a six-hour flight from Barcelona to New York after your mother tells you to come home because your father has had a mild heart attack and will be fine, and you suddenly realize that she sugar-coated it so you wouldn’t worry.

It’s also what the four-hour train from JFK to D.C. felt like. And the thirty minute cab ride from Union Station to the hospital.

When I got to the hospital, it was three in the morning. I told the nurse at the front desk my name and my father’s name. She said he was in intensive care and that I should follow the signs to get there.

As I moved toward in the direction of the elevators, I was gripped by this panic that he was alive but would die before I got to his room. So, I ran to the elevator, pressed the button repeatedly while it took me to the fourth floor, darted through the doors as soon as they opened, and sprinted down the hallway until I reached the admitting nurse at the ICU.

It turned out that my father wasn’t dead. But he also hadn’t suffered a minor heart attack. And it was far from certain that he’d be fine.

He was in a coma.

* * *

My father never regained consciousness nor opened his eyes.

I was the only one in the hospital room when he passed. My sister and mother had gone back to the house to shower, but I stayed behind with him. I was reading the same paperback I’d begun in Paris when the alarms started to ring. My father’s heart rate monitor, which I’d watched with the intensity of a gambler playing the slots when I’d first arrived, had gone flat.

To this day, when my mother recounts the last days of my father’s life, she makes a point to say that he stayed alive just long enough for me to say goodbye. And maybe he did. It would certainly be just like my father to tell the Grim Reaper to wait because he needed to do something for his son.

It took me a very long time – I was already working at Goldman and living in New York, and it might even have been after I moved into my second apartment in the city, before I was able to finally summon the courage to ask my mother if my father was angry at me when he died because of the air conditioner incident. She said that she’d wished I’d asked sooner, because it had never really occurred to her that I harbored that concern.

“I think about it all the time,” I said.

“Your father was never angry with you, Adam. Someday, when you have children, you’ll understand that. I’m not saying that he didn’t get disappointed in the things you did and said, but to answer your question, no, he wasn’t angry. I remember him being upset when you left because he wanted to spend more time with you. Both of us did, because we knew that as soon as you graduated, you’d be going to Europe, and then, as soon as you got home, you’d be starting work in New York. And, I’m not going to say that he thought the way you behaved was in any way appropriate, but your father was never one to hold a grudge. Especially with people he loved. He also understood you were under a lot of stress at that particular time. If anything, I remember him saying to me that he could have handled the situation better, and I was the one trying to tell him not to be so hard on himself.”

I don’t which part struck me as the most surprising -- that he wasn’t angry with me or that he shouldered some of the blame. I also wasn’t sure which one would have made me sadder.

My mother was not a very intuitive person. In fact, it was a running joke between Amy and me of that she failed to see things that was obvious to the rest of us, to the point that at one point we called her Madame Obtuse. But she apparently could read my mind in that moment because she said, “Adam, your father loved you more than life itself, and he also knew that you loved him. That’s all he was thinking about until the last moment of his life. Which I suppose is just another way of saying that he wasn’t mad at you. He was your father.”

* * *

I am now older than my father ever was. I have two sons of my own, both of whom are older than I was that summer of 1988.

Michael, my first born, was named for my father. He’s a high-strung young man, with an artistic temperament, by which I mean that he’s hard on himself and others in pursuit of a perfection he’ll never achieve. He works as a lawyer in Chicago, representing labor unions, which I think would have made my old man proud, even though, to my knowledge, he was never a union man himself. My youngest, Benjamin, has an easy way about him, which reminds me of my father more than me. Ben chose to follow in my footsteps to stake out a career in finance, and whereas I would have thought him temperamentally unsuited for the rough and tumble of that life, he has thrived.

Growing up, I never questioned that I’d become more financially successful than my father. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined the distance I’d put between us in that regard. Last year, I earned more every day than my father did in his best year. I don’t know if he would have been impressed by that, though.

There have been many times in my adulthood that I’ve asked myself whether my father would be proud of the man I’ve become. I invariably hear back his approval. And, truly, I think he would be. I know without any doubt that he would have told me that he was, because he was that way.

But I cannot deny that in the things that matter most in this life, I have fallen short of the standard he set. I’m not the father to my boys that my father was to me. Work has always taken up too much of my time, and our wealth has sometimes not made clear to them the values that my father tried his utmost to instill in me.

I might say that my failings as a father are compounded by the fact that my boys, who are as different from each other as two people who share DNA could be, have in common that they are each a better son to me than I was to him. But maybe that is my saving grace, instead.

This is the second time I have outlived nearly everyone I’ve known. Trust me, it’s no easier in your ninth decade than your first.

My daughter sits beside me, trying to maintain a brave face as the executive director goes through her shpiel --welcoming me to LakeView (and yes, they capitalize the V), providing me with the mealtime hours, rattling through the house rules. Julie has spent the better part of the last month doing the things that good daughters must do when faced with realization that her only living parent is on death’s door, culminating in the selection of LakeView as the best place for me to die.

When the preliminaries have been completed, the executive director, whose name I’ve already forgotten, says she has some questions for me. It’s a weak ruse; her purpose is not to solicit answers, as Julie has provided the pertinent information as part of the application process. Rather, she’s trying to ascertain if I have the faculties to answer her questions at all.

“Full name,” she says.

“Jacob Isaacson,” I say, without hesitation.

“And your . . . prior home address?”

“9 Corona Road. Bloomington Hills, Michigan.”

“Date of birth?”

This time I’m slower to respond. It’s not because I’m addled, however. Rather, my pause is more akin to a careful step on a slick stair. It reminds me of being bilingual: the other language still rises to the surface first, stubborn and familiar, before I manage the translation.

Julie knows—the only person alive who does—the reason for my pregnant pause. While I’m still working through the conversion in my head, she fills the awkward silence.

“March 23, 1937,” she says.

* * *

I’ve read too many obituaries that turn lives into résumés. Or worse, are glowing tributes that make saints of ordinary people. Neither version has ever struck me as a fitting epitaph. A life isn’t a list of accomplishments; it’s the quiet moments shared with loved ones, the hopes and dreams that have been pursued, and their outcomes, for better and for worse.

Julie will write my obituary. Although she possesses a poet’s sensibility about her, and she’ll undoubtedly do her utmost to honor me, I’m certain it will be more or less like all the rest. She’ll start off by setting out the relevant dates and then reference my surviving loved ones. Maybe there’ll be a sentence or two about my education and business success. It’s customary to list the names of those who have predeceased me, so my parents and older brother will likely get that mention. There may even be something whimsical in an effort to bring me to life, so to speak. I don’t know what she’ll choose, but my guess is she’ll decide among my love for Michigan football, my voracious reading habits, the fact that I’ve become a pretty fair bridge player in my old age, or perhaps something I don’t value at all, but which caught her eye as representation of the life I lived. Toward the end there will be some indication of the time and place of my funeral, and the charity for those so inclined to make donations in lieu of sending flowers.

The most important thing about me – at least as far as the outside world is concerned – will be there too, even though it’s not something I’ve done, and certainly not something I’m proud of. But I have no doubt that included among the people I’ve loved and the successes I’ve enjoyed will be a line about the worst part of my life: he is a survivor of Auschwitz, it will say.

* * *

After the intake procedure is complete, Julie and I are led down a wide corridor until we arrive at what the Executive Director refers to as my “new home.” Someone has tried their best to make it otherwise, but there is just so much you can do with a hospital room and not have it be that. The bed, a twin, with a metal railing, unmistakably announces that this space is for the infirm. Although there are no monitors or IV poles, I know from the open doors we passed that those will be wheeled in when the time comes. A television hangs on the wall, a putty grey vinyl recliner facing it. A small desk and a wood dresser under the television complete the furnishings.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to settle in,” our host says.

She doesn’t say that she hopes I’ll enjoy my time at LakeView. I think that’s because she knows, as I do, that I will not. It’s not because I’ll die here, though. Death doesn’t frighten me—in some ways, I wish it would hurry up and arrive already. It’s the idea of greeting it here that saddens me. I’ve spent a lifetime filling the spaces I inhabited with memories and hopes, but this room – the last one I will ever occupy – has no past or future.

* * *

At this point I should address certain logistical things.

I have stage four liver cancer. It’s a return engagement with this opponent, and this

time it will defeat me. My mind, however, remains clear – like an old knife in which the handle might be worn to the nub, but the blade is keen as ever. Although I sometimes forget why I’ve entered a room, I recall everything I want to remember, and many things I’d prefer not to. A blessing and a curse as they say.

I’m relatively pain free. Not all the time, but the physical ailments that accompany getting older – and being really old – haven’t become appreciably worse with the cancer’s return. They will, I know, but the whole point of being at the LakeView Center is to manage my discomfort. The price to be paid for that relief is that I will not be myself in the end. I have no interest in suffering, so that’s a trade-off I’m more than willing to make, but not without hoping that my residency here will be brief.

My wife, Lily, died at home, claimed by a different cancer than the one now coming for me. That I was with her every step of that final journey felt like the truest coda to our life. But I won’t ask my daughter to bear that weight. I much prefer that her memory be of the man I was in my life, not the one I became right before death.

How long it will be before that line is anyone’s guess, but if I were a betting man, I would take the under on four months. That seems about right. Enough time for me to be of sound mind to reflect on everything that has made me . . . well, me, but not so long that I’m like that last guest at a party who refuses to leave even after the music has stopped.

When the cancer first took hold, which was about five years ago, I turned to philosophy, immersing myself in the necessary tomes -- Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, Marx, Kant – and the latter brought me to David Hume, an empiricist who postulated that our identities are nothing but a bundle of perceptions. At first, I found that concept deflating, but I’ve since come to embrace it. I need no further proof that we lack a unified narrative of self than to consider that the boy I was once would not even know what to call me today.

* * *

Many Holocaust survivors believe it’s their sacred duty to talk about their experience.

While I’d much prefer not to visit that time, I understand my obligation to do so, and for that reason have addressed synagogues and high schools to fulfill my role as a living embodiment of the cruelty that can exist in the world.

I always tell my tale without emotion. It’s not for lack of feeling, as much as a defense mechanism to keep those feelings at bay. Even so, when I relate how I learned of my parents’ deaths, there is never a dry eye in the house.

“With my father,” I say, “no one ever told me. I knew he was gone when I saw another inmate, someone new to the camp, wearing his shoes.”

My story about my mother’s death is even more heartbreaking. “One morning, she said goodbye and told me not to worry,” I say as if I’m recounting our usual routine. “But she didn’t say she’d be back soon,” I add, “which is how I knew that she wouldn’t.”

I don’t tell people that I learned of my older brother’s death only after the camps were liberated. He’d been sent elsewhere, and I never discovered whether he died in the gas chambers or from illness, and while I might have been able to discover this fact, I haven’t pursued it because it hardly matters.

I’m haunted by something far worse when it comes to my brother. Since shortly after his death, whenever I’ve been asked if I had any siblings, I have always said no.

People invariably conclude that I was spared by Divine providence. I do not. My life is a testament that there could not possibly be a God, and heaven and hell are right here on earth. Or perhaps, more accurately, I believe that if there is a lesson to be learned from my experience it’s this: whether you live in a concentration camp or a palace, randomness alone determines who lives and who dies.

* * *

Julie opens the one suitcase I’ve brought and begins the process of settling me in. As she does, I can’t deny there’s something humbling about seeing my life reduced to a handful of hangers and two drawers. The things that mean the most to me – photographs of loved ones, books I’ve read, the jewelry I bought my wife, even the home that I lived in for fifty years, I’ve already bequeathed to Julie for her to do with how she pleases.

That thought brings me back to the first gift I gave her, bestowed before she was even born. By then, I had ceased practicing Judaism in any sense of the word, but there were still vestiges of my faith to which I adhered, more of out of muscle memory than devotion. Among them was that children should not be named for anyone living.

“It’s your decision in the end,” Lily said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t hide behind some religious evil eye voodoo that you don’t believe in anyway. Our daughter’s name should be meaningful and bring joy. Will naming her Julie be that for you?”

* * *

Fifteen years ago, I finally summoned the courage to tell my daughter the truth about her father. We had all gone to Israel to celebrate the bat mitzvah of my eldest granddaughter. Shortly after we arrived in the Holy Land, I asked Julie to accompany me on a short excursion.

“It’s something I always do when I’m in Israel, and this time I want you to experience it with me,” I explained.

“I’ve got a lot to do still, Dad,” she replied. “Confirming guides and making sure that the caterer is all set and –”

I interrupted her to-do list. “I know, but it’s very important to me.”

We had not yet reached that circle of life moment when my needs became paramount to hers. That would come after her mother’s diagnosis, when Julie first began to consider the finite nature of our time together. But even during that trip to Israel, when my daughter’s primary concern was, as it should have been, the family she made with her husband and children, I knew she wouldn’t deny her father something he said was very important.

“Where, exactly, are we going?” she asked.

“A cemetery,” I said.

“To see who?” she said.

“It’ll be easier to understand when we’re there,” I said.

I wasn’t withholding to create suspense. Rather, I thought I owed it to him.
There’s a phrase in Hebrew — chesed shel emet. It translates literally as “the truest act of

kindness.” It’s most often invoked around burials, when the living perform rites the dead can never repay. But in the context of my own life, this truest kindness was granted to me long before I understood what it meant.

* * *

Mount Herzl, the final resting place for those who fell in the 1948 War of Independence, sits scarcely three miles from the Old City of Jerusalem. Each grave appears to rest atop a pedestal, the grassy top like a neatly tucked blanket, the flat stone marker at its head suggesting a pillow.

The markers are all in Hebrew. Although Julie doesn’t speak a word of the language, she can identify the letters that comprise her father’s name.

“Creepy,” she said, her voice carrying a half-joking lilt she used whenever something unsettled her and she didn’t want to admit it.

“This is where my brother is buried,” I said.

Julie was now understandably confused.

“You and your brother have the same name?” she asked.

“Do you see his date of birth?” I answered.

She turned to look back at the marker. “The 19^th of Adar, 1934?”

The Hebrew calendar is lunar based, which is why Jewish holidays fall on different days each year. Adar is the twelfth month of the year and can arrive as early as mid-February and as late as April 1.

“His birthday was March 23,” I said.

“And the same birthday,” she said in a cadence that revealed she knew that we did not.

“On the plus side, I’m actually four years younger than everyone – except your mother – thinks.”

Julie does not smile at my quip. Instead, she looks like someone who finally understands she’s been playing a game all wrong. And because her father’s identity is not a game, but something upon which she believed she could rely without question, I understand that she must feel betrayed.

I heard it as an indictment: why was I pretending to be someone I wasn’t?

The short answer was that I was young and alone, and using my brother’s name was the only way I knew how to be reunited with the only family I had left. The longer answer was rooted in the laws that governed Holocaust survivors. Because I had been granted de facto recognition as an Israeli citizen — de facto because the Citizenship Law wouldn’t be enacted until 1952 — I qualified for certain immigration preferences that my brother never received; he died in the camps before any such status could attach. There might have been other, more legitimate paths to the same outcome, but this was the one presented to me. And I took it, not fully understanding that it wasn’t a loophole at all, but the beginning of a transformation.

Once I came to America, I guarded my secret for fear of being deported. There came a time, of course, when my business success and standing in the community shielded me from the fate others might have suffered in my circumstances, but I continued the subterfuge because after having done so for so long I didn’t know whether it even was a lie anymore.

But before I was able to utter a single word, Julie clarified her question. “Why didn’t you tell me this sooner?” she said.

“I’m not quite sure,” I replied.

* * *

A few years ago, Lily and I were on our living room sofa, drinking wine, while the fireplace was in full roar. I said something about how having two names was like having two lives, thinking that I was being profound.

“Wouldn’t that, by your logic, mean you’ve led at least half a dozen or so lives?” Lily said.

“Is that a riddle?” I asked.

“Not a very difficult one if it is. Think about it. Yes, you were once Binyamin and now you’re Jacob. But what about all the other names you’ve gone by?”

“Like what?” I said, still missing the forest for the trees in this conversation.

“Dad, for one. And even there, you’ve been dada, and daddy before that, and remember that phase where Julie called you papa? People at work call you Mr. Isaacson. Then there are the names that I’m hoping I’m the only one who uses – my dear or sweetheart.

Lily smiled that smile of hers, the one I conjure whenever I see her face in my memory. “And then there’s Grandpa and Pop-pop,” she continued. “I bet if we really made a list there would be even more. Doesn’t each one denote a different person? Maybe even a different life?”

* * *

After my clothes and other belongings are put away, Julie spends enough time with me so

I will not feel as if she was eager to leave, before she says that she must be getting home. As she stands at the threshold of my new home, she kisses me goodbye and then says that

she loves me, and I say the same thing back to her. With children of her own, I suspect Julie understands how the words differ when spoken from parent to child than the other way.

“I’ll see you soon,” she says.

“Hopefully I’ll be here,” I reply.

It’s been a throw-away line for some time, and I think it’s still funny, but I can tell that Julie does not. I store away that it’s time to retire the joke. There’s nothing funny about any of this, after all.

After Julie leaves, I shut the door and open my laptop. For someone who barely used a computer during my working life, I’m reasonably proficient with one. Don’t get me wrong, I can’t do a fraction of the things that my grandchildren or even Julie can, but I know how to navigate to certain websites and to send and receive emails. A few years ago, Julie showed me how Siri works, so I could do my searches without the need to type, which is sometimes difficult because of my arthritic hands.

“Hey Siri,” I say, and like always, feel silly doing it. “Open a Word document.”

I watch in amazement as the computer obeys my command, and the blank page appears before me. “My greatest memories,” I say. The words appear, as if by magic. I pause for a moment and then add, “by Jacob Isaacson.”

Julie will find my recollections after I’m gone. When she reads my words, I hope she understands they describe a life richer than I one I ever dared imagine. Though it began in the darkest of places, I was somehow able to experience joys I might never have cherished as deeply without the contrast. And while I once thought my life divided—two names, two identities—what Lily said all those years ago was right: I have been many different people across the years, and what matters is not the name I carried in each of those incarnations, but that in every one of them I was able to love and be loved.

Liza Minelli is an odd person for me to be thinking about at a moment like this. At any moment, really—I’m not even a fan. I’ve never seen Cabaret all the way through.

I’m standing in the Château de Versailles, in the Orangerie no less, about to receive the Pritzker Prize. Not too shabby, if I do say so myself. And as the reason I’m here would suggest, my opinion on such matters isn’t entirely without weight.

The irony is that I should have spent all these years imagining Irene Joliot-Curie in 1935 Stockholm accepting the Nobel, not Liza in 1972 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion being handed an Oscar. That’s because the Academy Awards honor a single performance, while the Pritzker Prize recognizes the architect who has demonstrated a lifetime of excellence.

In addition to Irene and her mother, who both won Nobels in chemistry, there is a father–son pair who did the same in physics. If you expand beyond the sciences—into sports, film, music, literature, what have you—the only other parent–child duos to be honored for lifetime achievement in the same field are two sets of hockey Hall of Famers. That’s the whole list: the Curies, the Bohrs, the Hulls, and the Howes.

And now my father and I join this very small club.

The chairman of the Pritzker Foundation has been singing my praises for several minutes now. Judging from the rising swell in his voice, he’s beginning his finale.

“His work is not only beautiful, but enduring. From the Hester Library in the United States, to the groundbreaking Spider Buildings in Berlin, to the recently completed Emirates Tower in Abu Dhabi, this year’s recipient has spent a lifetime erecting structures that transform skylines—and the lives within them—in equal measure. It is therefore my honor to bestow the highest distinction architecture has to offer upon Cyrus Ellison Jr.”

I stand and take the stage, thanking the chairman for his generous introduction as he hands me the bronze medallion bearing Vitruvius’s principles—firmness, commodity, delight. Behind the podium, preparing to deliver the acceptance speech I drafted in my hotel room but have been composing all my adult life, I’m struck by a quiet, sorrowful realization: my true patron saint was never Liza, or the Nobel laureates, or the hockey legends who proved a child could match a parent’s lifetime achievement. It was Inigo Montoya.

Our motivations could not have been further apart, yet his life—like mine—was shaped by the long, narrow pursuit of revenge. And when Inigo finally accomplished the task to which he dedicated his life, he found himself face-to-face with the question I’m wrestling with now: who are you when the thing that defined you is over?

* * *

I fly home the next day. On Monday, I awake at my regular time and go to the office as if it were any other workday. However, it will be different because there will not be any that follow.

I’m greeted by Barbara, my admin — though that title hardly captures all she does to

keep the trains running on time. She welcomes me with a warm smile and her congratulations, but doesn’t ask the obvious question – whether my father was in Paris to witness my triumph – which spares me from having to tell her that true to my prediction, he wasn’t.

I’ve never shared with anyone my feelings about the great Cyrus Ellison, Sr. When asked, I say only that we’re estranged and have been for some time. Each time I do, I’m struck by the word’s etymological kinship to strange, and how it rings false because not speaking to my father all these years has been the most natural of responses under the circumstances.

“I wasn’t expecting you to return so soon,” Barbara says.

My original plan had been to stay in Paris until the following week. I’ve returned because I’m a big believer that bad news should be delivered without delay.

“I’ve decided to close the office,” I say.

She doesn’t look surprised… ‘I’m glad you’ve decided to take some time for yourself.’
It unnerves me that she understood the truth long before I did: that devoting my life to

proving I was better than my father came at the cost of having a life at all.

* * *

On the first day of the rest of my life, I go to my mother’s grave. On the day she was buried, the heat had been heavy and vindictive, the sun bearing down on the mourners as if punishing them for paying their respects. This morning couldn’t be more different: gray, cold, the kind of day that makes everything appear slightly faded — the gravestones, the sky, even the air.

Her tombstone reads: beloved daughter, mother, and wife. I know the first to be true, assume the second is as well, and can say with certainty that the last is a lie.

My father either never loved my mother, or his conception of the emotion bears no resemblance to my definition. For as long as I can remember, he was absent from our lives – at the building site of whatever project had captured his single-minded focus at the time – or, as I later learned, with any one of any number of women who were not my mother.

The day after I graduated from college, he told her he wanted a divorce. The day after that, she took her life.

The note she left veered between declarations of how much she loved me and explanations for why she believed she had no choice but to leave, but it ended with a devastating confession: she had concluded that the surest way to hurt my father was to sacrifice herself so that everyone would understand the depth of the pain he’d caused her.

I might have dismissed it as the rantings of a troubled mind or hated her for the choice she made. But for reasons I’ve questioned nearly every day since, I instead took it upon myself to finish her work if only to show my father that the pain he’d inflicted went far beyond her.

* * *

From the cemetery, I drive two hours north to the stretch of western Massachusetts that forms the portion of the Appalachians known as the Berkshires. Its equidistance from Boston and New York has long made it a summer playground for the well-to-do, though its residents take pride in attracting a more artistic crowd than the bankers and lawyers who dominate the Hamptons or Newport.

I’ve rented a house for the year. It reminds me a little of Nick Carraway’s cottage in The Great Gatsby—an eyesore, but a modest one. The furnishings are tasteful, chosen with care, but nowhere near the standard of my Manhattan apartment. What sold me wasn’t what was inside, but the view—one I could imagine staring at forever.

The mountains in the distance feel both enclosing and beckoning—hemming me in while promising an expanse just beyond their ridge. I spend the next several weeks staring at them, filling my days with reading and music. In the evenings, I pair those pursuits with a cabernet or the occasional scotch. My only contact with others is the weekly run into town for provisions and the two nights I sat at the bar of a local burger joint, mostly keeping to myself.

Whatever fear I had of going stir-crazy fades quickly. The monotony becomes oddly satisfying, the comfort of knowing each day will be much like the last. For the first time in memory, I wake without a building to refine or a father to eclipse. The quiet feels earned—a space for me to be myself, or perhaps to finally discover who that is when resentment is stripped away.

* * *

One morning, shortly before eight, there came a hard knock at the door. Behind it was a woman in her mid-to-late thirties. Her sweaty face and Lycra clothing told me that she’d been running.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she said, slightly out of breath, “but I took a nasty tumble and was hoping you might have a bandage.”

I scanned down her leg to see the trail of blood. “Of course,” I said, though I doubted I actually did.

I was tempted to invite her but even in the Berkshires, women don’t step into the homes of strange men. So, I suggested she sit on the porch rocker and elevate her leg while I went inside.

The house, unsurprisingly, wasn’t stocked with medical supplies. So, I reached for the darkest towel I could find in the linen closet, filled a pitcher with water, dug up some electrical tape from the junk drawer and grabbed a roll of paper towels.

Returning to the porch, I said, “I’m afraid I don’t have a proper bandage, but you can use the towel and water to clean yourself off, and then the paper towel and tape to form a makeshift one. That should stop the bleeding until someone with some medical training can take a look.”

She thanked me and, after dunking the towel in the water, began to dab her knee, wincing each time the fabric touched her wound.

The cleaned skin revealed a nasty gash. Blood again began to flow almost immediately. “I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was lost in the scenery, and the next thing I

knew I was flat on my face. My phone doesn’t get reception up here—and even if it did, I’m not calling an ambulance for a scraped knee. So, I thought I’d rely on the kindness of a stranger.”

“You may actually need a stitch or two, Blanche,” I said.

She looked up and smiled. “My name’s actually Jodi.”

“I suddenly wish mine was Stanley, but it’s Cyrus. Can I drive you somewhere? Home or the hospital, even? You really shouldn’t be running—or walking—on that.”

She glanced at her still bleeding leg. “Yeah, I think that makes sense. Thank you, Cyrus.”

* * *

The following week, I took my coffee out to the porch, hoping Jodi might run by. No luck. She didn’t appear the next week either. But on Sunday evening, when I left the house for my regular provision trip, I found a note tucked into the screen door.

Hoping you’ll let me repay your kindness by taking you to dinner. Saturday night at 7 p.m. at Tony’s. I’ll be there and hope you will too. — Jodi

As a younger man, I moved in and out of relationships. As my work became less a profession than an obsession, I stopped trying altogether, on the theory that there was little point picking up a book when you already knew you’d never finish it. Among all the other changes I was now ready to make in my life, sharing it with someone was atop of the list.

Of course, I couldn’t be sure that was Jodi’s intent. I couldn’t rule out that she was merely saying thank you for my assistance in her moment of need. Still, the nervousness in my belly told me how much I hoped that her interest went beyond that.

She was sitting at the bar when I arrived at Tony’s. A moment later we were led to a quiet table in the back, where we exchanged the familiar awkward banter of a first date. She asked whether I’d been to Tony’s (I hadn’t). I asked about her injury (“I’ve gotten assurances of survival”) and I admitted I would have reached out had I been able (“that’s on you for not asking for my number”). Soon enough, I learned she worked at a large bank, in a back-office role (“numbers were never my thing”), that she lived in Tribeca, and was recently divorced (“Don’t ask”).

I told her I was an architect, recently retired, but deflected when she asked which projects I’d worked on, saying most of them were outside New York City. When she asked my last name, I lied outright. With a new life, I felt entitled to jettison everything from the old one.

The evening ended with us both saying we had a wonderful time. We agreed to see each other again on Friday, when she arrived from the city. That date led to another on Saturday.

We texted through the next week and repeated the same routine the following weekend. Facetimes were added to our time apart, and it wasn’t long after that Jodi would arrive at my house on Friday and not leave again until Monday morning.

* * *

Over the July 4 weekend, I finally told Jodi what I’d previously been so afraid to share -- my last name, my father’s role in my life, about the rage I felt toward him following my mother’s death, and my subsequent single-minded devotion to someday becoming a better architect as the only way I could imagine to hurt him like he’d hurt.

I spoke for nearly an hour, virtually uninterrupted. When I was finally finished, she said, “I knew.”

“Really?”

“Not about your mother – or your relationship with your father -- but your last name. When the fake name you gave me didn’t turn up and hits, I googled Cyrus and architect, and your smiling face popped right up. From there it was a hop, skip, and a jump to your father’s Wikipedia page.”

“I didn’t mean to lie to you,” I said, sheepishly. “I thought of it more as... being even more truthful. For so long I’ve been his son, and I’m not that anymore. Does that make any sense?”

She laughed—a small, forgiving sound that conveyed my sin wasn’t a hanging offense. “I could teach a master class on wanting to start your life over without being tied to the mistakes you’ve made. I also know a thing or two about the other stuff. After my divorce, I held on to that rage because... I don’t know, I thought he deserved it. Then I thought it defined me, so I couldn’t let it go for fear of what I’d be without it. And to top it all off, I actually went and changed my name so I wouldn’t be associated with my ex-husband, so that part resonates with me too.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way. Perhaps Jodi and my paths weren’t so different. Each of us had been betrayed by someone we loved and were now trying to move forward as someone new.

* * *

The rest of the summer was like a roller coaster. The weekends in Jodi’s company were filled with the kind of exhilaration that made me feel alive for perhaps the first time, and our days apart were akin to the coaster’s slow climb – filled with the excitement that the thrill would soon be at hand.

I had so little frame of reference for love that I couldn’t believe I’d found it so quickly—or so completely—but every part of me screamed otherwise. This wasn’t lust; I’d never been stirred much by carnal desire. This was something far deeper: the feeling of being my best self in someone else’s presence, and of wanting to know another person and to be known by her – warts and all.

The week before Thanksgiving, Jodi told me she was pregnant. She said it hesitantly, as if she feared the news might be unwelcome, but I couldn’t contain my joy. We were married the day after Christmas.

When Jodi slipped the ring onto my finger, I truly believed that I’d been remade. And the following summer, when our son was born, I felt that magical transformation all over again.

* * *

In December, one night while we were eating dinner, Jodi told me what I’d already read online—namely, that my father had been awarded the American Institute of Architects’ Gold Medal. It was the one feather missing from his over-plumaged cap.

“Good for him,” I said.

And I meant it. At long last, my father’s world no longer had anything to do with mine.

A few weeks later, Jodi asked if there was an awards ceremony to go along with my father’s prize.

“Next month,” I said. “In Boston.”

“Have you ever been to one?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “I never wanted to run into him.”

“Maybe this year,” she said carefully, “we should go.”

I looked at her as if she’d asked me to solve a riddle, the answer to which had stumped me. “Why would we do that?”

“Because,” she said quietly, “I think it’s time.”

* * *

The grand ballroom at the Fairmont Copley Plaza holds more than a thousand people. For the AIA ceremony, it’s outfitted in tables of ten, which have been sold for about $10,000 each. I procured seats from a former colleague whom I swore to secrecy. Our table is thankfully far enough from the stage that I’m certain my father won’t be able to identify me from the podium, ensuring he’ll remain unaware of my presence until I’m ready to confront him.

An address by the AIA chairman begins the evening, which is followed by the presentation and acceptance speeches for a slew of awards. Finally, last year’s recipient of the Gold Medal is introduced to award this year’s honor to my father.

My first glimpse of Cyrus Ellison Senior in more than thirty years feels like waking from a particularly vivid dream— foreign at first, then suddenly familiar. Still, there are differences: while every hair remains on his head, now they are entirely white. He doesn’t stand quite as straight, and there’s a carefulness in his gait. It isn’t until he speaks, though, that I see the full ravage of time. His voice is thinner than I could have imagined—an old man’s voice.

* * *

After the ceremony, a queue forms not unlike the receiving line at a wedding. As I offer my congratulations from one winner to the next, I periodically scan down to the end, each time checking – and then re-checking -- that my father has not realized I’m here.

When I step in front of him, there’s a split second in which he’s looking at me but still hasn’t yet seen me. When the realization dawns, his eyes drop and his face tightens, but then his expression morphs again, so that now he appears on the verge of tears.

I don’t have time to speak before his arms are around me, a reaction that surprises me as much as if he’d thrown a punch. His embrace tells me how little I’ve thought about this moment from his vantage point.

He maintains his grip until he’s ready for the next step in this dance, and when we separate his eyes travel over me, as if for the first time. I take his measure too, though I’m certain that we’re seeing vastly different things. He’s undoubtedly cataloguing the time that has passed, whereas I’m thinking about what is still to come.

“Thank you for being here, Cyrus,” he says.

I don’t tell him he’s welcome, still unable to offer him even that much. By now we’ve already exceeded the time allotted for each well-wisher, and I can feel the buckle in the line behind us. My father must sense it too, because he says, “Can we talk after this?” Then he adds, “Please,” in a voice so plaintive it’s not far from how I imagine he’d sound if he were a starving man asking for a piece of bread.

“Not tonight,” I say. “This is your night—you should enjoy it. But tomorrow, yes.”

He nods. “Will you meet me at the hotel dining room? Ten a.m.?”

“I’ll be there,” I say.

* * *

I am no less apprehensive about seeing my father the next morning than I was before walking into his company for the first time in nearly three decades. My heart is pounding and my steps uncertain when I move toward his table.

He stands when I approach, and then we shake hands, as if this were a business meeting.

“I’m so glad you came,” he says, trying his best to smile. “I was a little worried you

wouldn’t.”

“I’m the one who traveled to see you,” I reply.

“I know. And I’m grateful for it. I can’t express how much. I gave serious consideration to going to Paris when you got the Pritzker, but I assumed that wouldn’t have been well received. But you should know that I was enormously proud from afar.”

There’s nothing objectionable about what he’s said. In every version of this meeting I’ve

rehearsed, he says something just like that. Perhaps I should even be appreciative, but I’m not. I don’t want him to be proud of what I’ve accomplished; better that he be horrified that I’ve devoted so much of my life to what I thought would hurt him most.

“I’ve followed your career very closely,” he continues. “I’ve made it a point to visit every project, to read whatever I could about your work and about you. Which is why these last two years have been the worst for me. At least while you were in the public eye, I could maintain some kind of connection, but the quiet since then—it’s been very lonely.”

The irony hits hard: I’ve wounded him more by walking away from architecture than I ever did while earning accolades inside it. I’m about to unload—to tell him why I accomplished what I did, and why I left architecture after the Pritzker—when he says, “I’m very, very sorry, Cy.”

He stops there, as if he’s said enough. I’m not going to let him off that easily.

“For what, exactly?”

He sighs audibly, as if preparing himself for a jump off a high board. Then he takes that plunge.

“For everything. There’s no excuse for how I treated your mother all those years. I let myself believe that what went on between us wouldn’t affect you, but obviously that was nonsense. I wish… well, I wish I had done a great many things differently.”

This is what I came for—nearly word for word. When my father and I had last spoken, back when he still saw me as a child, he absolved himself of blame by insisting that my mother’s choice to end her life was hers alone. Perhaps if he’d said then what he just did, the silence between us wouldn’t have lasted so long.

I’m still considering what, if anything, I’m supposed to do with this abrupt shift in the my father’s viewpoint, when Jodi enters the restaurant, our son in her arms. As the magnitude of that introduction takes hold, I feel my grip on the past begin to loosen.

My father is still bracing for my response to his apology when I rise to greet my wife. Just as when I saw him on the receiving line, I’m again witness to his confusion giving way to bliss.

“This is my wife, Jodi,” I say.

Jodi doesn’t introduce herself or extend her hand. Instead, she lifts Ollie toward him and says, “Ollie, meet your grandfather.”

I can’t pretend to know my father’s thoughts in that moment, but for me it’s a choice

point: I can keep punishing him for the past by denying what he clearly wants, or I can offer him a grace he hasn’t yet earned. As I weigh those options, something shifts. This isn’t about him, I remind myself. It’s about the life I want to live—the person I intend to become.

“Do you want to hold him?” I ask my father.

* * *

On the drive back to Manhattan, with Ollie asleep in the back, Jodi finally asks how I feel about letting my father back into my life. “I suppose time will tell,” I say.

“I think you’re going to find it’s good for you . . . and it’s definitely much better for me,” Jodi says, a smile on her lips suggesting that I’m being set up.

“How’s that?” I ask, playing the straight man.

Your other option was to become the Dread Pirate Roberts, right? Ollie and I would’ve been so lonely if you’d spent all your time on the Revenge taking no prisoners.

“How long have you been storing that one?” I ask with a laugh.

“A long time,” she says, now laughing too. “But thank you for letting me use it.”

“As you wish,” I say, with the lilt Wesley used addressing Buttercup.

I turn back to the road, but Jodi isn’t quite done. “I hope you see this means

you finally accomplished your goal,” she says.

“What goal is that?”
“With your father.”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Now I suppose I have to win the AIA Gold Medal, don’t I?”
She looks at me. “Do you really not see it?”

Her tone conveys that the conversation has turned serious. “No, maybe I don’t,” I say.

“You set out to become the better architect, but I hope you realize now that never mattered. What always has —what you’ve finally shown him—is that you’re the better husband, the better father… the better man.”

The Manhattan skyline soon comes into view, which makes me think of how many towers my father and I have each raised. He believed those buildings of stone and steel would be his legacy. For a long time, I thought they’d be mine too.

But when I glance at Jodi beside me and then in the rearview at Ollie playing with his hands, I know better. Whatever comes next—for me, for my father, for any of us—I want my legacy to be what I am to the people I love.

Usually, I sleep well. But tonight I couldn’t settle, so I got out of bed and went
downstairs, turned on the TV, and looked for something mindless. I stopped when I saw Stand By Me.

When the movie first came out, I was about the same age as the characters, three out of four of whom matched my own friend group: I was the Gordie, recognized as the smartest; Jeff was our comic relief, the kind of kid who thought arm farts were hysterical. We didn’t have a Teddy, but Brian Shuster was our Chris — the River Phoenix character.

I’ve tuned in at the end — after they’ve found the body and made it home — the scene where Gordie tells Chris he can be anything he wants. Then the voiceover says how Chris always made the best peace, followed by the twist that he died while trying to stop a fight between strangers.

After River Phoenix fades from the screen, Richard Dreyfus is in his study, sitting in front of an old Apple Macintosh that has green pixelated font and a cursor that blinks as he types along with narration: I’ve never had any friends like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus. Does anyone? I sure as hell haven’t.

The last time I saw Jeff or Brian I was fourteen. Jeff and I are Facebook friends now, and when that connection was made, we caught up a bit through the messaging feature. Since then, our communications are reserved to wishing each other happy birthday when the site prompts us it’s that time. Brian isn’t on social media, aside from LinkedIn. It’s from that I surmise he now lives in Denver because that’s where the company he’s head of sales is based. In his profile picture he’s bald, but the rest of him looks exactly like I remember — handsome and confident, with a bit of mischief behind the eyes.

I’ve thought about reaching out to him too. LinkedIn also has a messaging feature, after all. But I’ve held back, wary of setting off a small Butterfly Effect that might unsettle the childhood memories I believe shaped the man I’ve become.

As the title song begins to play over the movie’s closing credits, I’m back thirty years in Jeff’s basement listening to Brian going on about some girl as if he was imparting the secret of life itself. I can visualize the scene as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, but what’s most vivid to me now is how I’m not so much looking at the two best friends I ever had as much as I’m trying to see myself through their eyes.

* * *

I once heard someone say that you’re from where you graduated from high school. Based on that, I’ve always said Fort Lauderdale. Even so, it never felt like home. Not the way East Carlisle had, the commuter town smack in the middle of New Jersey, where I was born and lived until the end of my freshman year in high school.

A few days before what would wind up being our last Christmas in East Carlisle, I was summoned to the dining room for a “family meeting.” It was the first, and maybe only, time I remember one being called.

“I have some good news,” my father said, but in the next breath he imparted the worst news a fourteen-year-old boy can hear. “We’re going to be moving to sunny Florida. I got a great job down there and I’m going right after the New Year to scout for our new home. Your mother and I have decided that the two of you will stay here until the school year is over.”

My mind raced through the stages of grief. Denial came first — No, this wasn’t real. Then anger — How could they do this to me? I skipped bargaining (three years spent living with Brian or Jeff was never going to fly), and depression would come later, which was how I landed on a kind the resignation that this was just another of fate’s cruel tricks against which I was powerless to resist.

Back then I lied easily — to others and to myself — and sometimes convinced myself that secrecy was a kind of superpower, even though it often felt more like kryptonite. So I resolved to keep quiet, especially around Brian and Jeff, about the fact that I’d be gone by summer, hoping to enjoy whatever time I had left without everyone knowing my expiration date.

* * *

My first day back from Christmas break I was sleepwalking my way out of fifth period English when Mr. Redmond called to me. Twice, apparently, because when I finally turned, he said, “I thought maybe you’d forgotten your name over the break, Ethan.”

Mr. Redmond was tall and thin in a way that conjured a pencil, maybe because his perfectly coiffed hair reminded me of an eraser, even though it was jet black and not pink. He was also a snappy dresser. While most teachers recycled the same boxy jacket and gray slacks, Mr. Redmond favored bold colors and almost always wore a vest.

He leaned against his desk like he was waiting for a bus. “Have a seat,” he said, nodding to the chair in front of him. “This won’t take long.”

For some reason, my lowering myself to sit down made him straighten up, to the point that I had to crane my neck to meet his eyes.

“Let me guess, you’re now asking yourself What kind of trouble am I in?” he said, smiling like he might be joking, even though that was exactly what I was thinking. “Let me put you out of your misery. You did nothing wrong. In fact, I’m happy to report that this is one of those rare moments when a teacher asks a student to stay after class because he did something right.”

Without uttering another word, Mr. Redmond spun around to his desk, opened his briefcase, pulled out some looseleaf pages and unceremoniously dropped them on my desk. It was my last assignment. In red at that top was the grade: A+, which was different from my usual grade in the class only because of the plus.

We were supposed to write a story where the main character has a special power. Mine was about a boy who became invisible whenever someone looked at him too closely. Casual glances didn’t matter, but a full-on stare would make him vanish. Because he was in high school, and had become adept at diverting others’ attention, it rarely happened — until one day his best friend looked at him for too long and too hard and the boy disappeared so completely that he was unable to find his way back.

“Ethan, this wasn’t just the best story in the class,” Mr. Redmond said. “God’s honest

truth, it’s the best one I’ve read in all my years giving this assignment.”

Although I was flattered by his praise, it also put me on edge. Writing the story alone in my room had felt like knowing a secret; but sitting there while Mr. Redmond beamed down at me, his smile as bright as a spotlight, made me wish I could disappear like the boy in my story.

“You may not know this, but aside from being everyone’s favorite ninth-grade English teacher, I’m also the faculty advisor to the Folio, the high school literary magazine. And I want to publish your story.”

* * *

By the time I made it across the building to gym class, Mr. Matarazzo waved me off suiting up, so I took a spot on the bleachers to watch my classmates play badminton. That was every bit as dull as it sounds, and a few minutes in, I pulled my story from my backpack and gave it another read.

The words felt a little flowery, and I noticed some typos, but I could see what Mr. Redmond had liked — there was an honesty to it, a vulnerability that came off the page. And that was the problem with agreeing to share it: it felt intrusive somehow, like if the whole school saw me naked. My biggest fear would be them laughing, but even if they were awestruck, I still didn’t want to be seen in that way.

I was still lost in that thought when the shrill whistle blew, followed immediately by the thunder of sneakers on the gym floor, announcing that class was over. While the other kids headed straight to the locker room, Brian made a beeline to me.

“What happened to you?” he asked.

I held up my story’s cover page. “Redmond thinks I’m Shakespeare, apparently.”

“Nice,” Brian said. “He didn’t give ours back yet, but I wrote mine in twenty minutes

during study hall, so...” He flashed the smile he was quickly learning excused a host of sins. “Can I read your masterpiece?”

I’d just told myself I didn’t want anyone reading it, but a small part of me made an exception for Brian. He was my best friend, after all. Then again, maybe that made him the last person who should read it.

“Sure, knock yourself out,” I said, and handed him the pages.

* * *

The next day, I told Mr. Redmond thanks, but no thanks, about publishing my story. He looked disappointed but said he understood. I thought the matter was closed, but after our next class, he held me back again.

“I was thinking maybe you’d be interested in working with me one-on-one,” he said. “You could write stories — for my eyes only — and I’d critique them.”

I was about to decline, thinking he was offering little more than extra homework. But then, as if he sensed my hesitation, he said, “Let me sweeten the deal. In exchange for… let’s say one essay a month, I’ll tell the college of your dreams that you took me up on this and that your desire to hone your craft is what will make you a great writer — and a great whatever-you-want-to-be. Believe me, colleges eat that stuff up with a spoon.”

I’d always assumed I’d wind up at the state university, the main campus of which sat in the town over from East Carlisle. I didn’t need a glowing recommendation to get accepted there. But now that in-state tuition wasn’t a part of my future, Mr. Redmond’s stamp of approval had some value.

“Yeah, that sounds really good. Thank you, Mr. Redmond.”

* * *

I got to the gym locker room late, which caused Brian to ask if Mr. Redmond and I were going steady. I told him that, in a manner of speaking, we were, and then explained the arrangement we’d struck.

You know, I read your story,” Brian said. “It was great. I really mean that. Not just

because mine was crap—yours kinda reminded me of... me a little bit. Sometimes, when I’m out there pitching, and I can feel everyone’s eyes on me, I just want to... vanish, you know?

I did, of course. More than Brian could have imagined.
Before I could say so, he asked, “You gonna let me read the others you write for

Redmond?”

“Sure, if you want,” I said, trying to sound casual. “But just you—not Jeff, or anyone else. Okay?”

“Our secret,” he said, smiling as if he understood, which made me both hope he did and pray that he didn’t. Then he lightly squeezed my arm to seal the deal.

* * *

Mr. Redmond gave me three topics for my first story: friendship, first love, and identity. It wasn’t a hard choice. First love and identity were doors I had no interest in walking through. Friendship, on the other hand, felt safe.

My story was about a boy named Ryan who hits a growth spurt before high school, becomes handsome and popular, and leaves his jealous friends behind to live happily ever after. Two days after I handed it in, I met with Mr. Redmond after school for his critique.

“The writing’s solid,” he said. “Your voice is clear, but you’ve made Ryan perfect—handsome, popular, talented—a god among boys. But c’mon, look around these halls, Ethan. Every person here, even the A-listers, has their issues. Portraying someone without flaws is a lie. And what’s my bottom line about fiction?”

“Even fiction has to be true,” I said.

“Correctamundo.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better next time,” I said.

“No, no,” Mr. Redmond said softly. “You are doing it, Ethan. Whether you like it or not, there’s a part of you that still can’t help but end up on the page. But you’re resisting that. It’s like a magician’s misdirection —‘look over here,’ so no one figures out the trick. But writing isn’t a trick. It’s brutal honesty. And to be great at it, you have to fully commit to that truth. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I almost said I didn’t, but instead heard myself agree. After all, what’s the point of lying to someone who already knows the truth?

* * *

A couple of days later, Brian slapped the pages of my latest story against my chest. “Pretty good,” he said. “I think I liked the other one better, though. The main guy here was cool enough, but I couldn’t figure out why he’d hang out with such losers. If he’s all that, shouldn’t he have cool friends? You know—like me and my friends.”

He smiled at me, and while that usually made me smile back, this time I felt a jolt of panic that I’d written too close to the bone. “Well, it’s not about you, so maybe that’s the problem.”

I’d meant it as a deflection, but the way his eyes dropped told me he’d taken it as something else. When he looked back up, there was a flicker of embarrassment before he masked it.

“I know it wasn’t about me, Eth. I’m not an idiot. I just… didn’t get it, I guess.”

The irony almost made me laugh. I’d been terrified I’d revealed too much, and now he wanted me to explain what I’d hidden too well. But this wasn’t his fault, and I didn’t want him thinking it was.

I put my hand on his arm, just for a moment. “No, you’re right. Redmond said the same thing. The other one’s better. This one needs work.”

* * *

The week we returned from Spring break, Jeff threw up in math. When I spoke to him by phone after school, he said he was running a fever, which meant that his basement was off-limits that weekend, and so invited Brian to spend Saturday night at my house.

My parents were going to the movies, but before they left, my father took me to Blockbuster. To my surprise – and joy – he let me rent Aliens – even though it was R-rated, which was the reason I hadn’t been allowed to see it in the theater.

Brian showed up with a duffle bag, which seemed strange. But as soon as he confirmed my parents weren’t home, he unzipped it to reveal a six-pack of beer.

“Since when do you drink?” I asked.

“Lenny McDermott, he’s eighteen,” Brian said, referencing a senior on the baseball team. “He bought some beer on the Spring Break trip. This is courtesy of my father, who keeps a stash in the garage.”

Brian popped the top off a can and handed it to me. Then he did the same for another that he kept for himself.

I watched him take a swig. “It’s . . . not great tasting,” he said. “But you’ll get used to it.”

I followed suit. “Delicious,” I said, which made Brian laugh because I said it while making a face indicating it was anything but.

Beers in hand and a bowl of chips on the coffee table, we settled into the living room to watch the movie. It wasn’t too long after they woke Ripley from hyperspace that we were each opening our second beer.

By then, I was well on my way to understanding alcohol’s appeal. My whole body felt light, weightless. Free, almost. And with my inhibitions lowered, I set out to share with Brian the secret I’d been holding from him and everyone else.

“I need to tell you something,” I said.

It felt not too unlike peering over the edge of a cliff, wondering if I’d survive the fall. I’d rehearsed for weeks what I was about to say, but the words stuck in my throat for fear that once I let them out into the world, nothing would ever be the same.

As if sensing my distress, Brian put his hand on my shoulder. “You can tell me anything, Eth, you know that.”

The combination of his hand on my shoulder and the earnest way he looked at me was more intoxicating than the beer. Whatever concern I had about sharing my secret was swept aside by my desire to believe what Brian had just said – that I could tell him anything.

So I just blurted it out: “My Dad got a job in Florida. I’m going to be moving right after the school year is over.”

Brian’s mouth clenched and his brow furrowed. “Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, as if it were my fault.

The emotion I’d kept inside for weeks burst through the small opening I’d allowed, and even though crying in front of Brian was the last thing I wanted, I couldn’t stop myself. Sensing my shame, he moved closer and draped an arm around me, giving me just enough cover to hide my face until I could pull myself together.

When we separated, I looked at him, and he smiled in a way that suggested it was all going to be okay. I wanted to tell him how much his friendship meant to me, how terrified I was about leaving East Carlisle, and a hundred variations of the same truth. But the words wouldn’t obey—and this time, instead of sadness, something else overtook me.

At first his lips tasted like beer, but then the flavor shifted into something sweeter. If I’d thought my head was buzzing before, now electricity rushed through me, as if I’d grabbed a live wire.

I felt his palms on my chest. For a heartbeat, his touch seemed impossibly welcome.

Then he shoved me back.

“What the fuck,” he said, his voice sharp with anger.

I pressed my lips together, trying to hide the evidence of what I’d done. “I’m sorry, Brian… the beer, and— I don’t know, maybe I’m drunk.”

“Getting drunk doesn’t make you a homo,” he said.

Of course it didn’t. But I wished it did, because if alcohol were to blame, I would have sworn it off for life.

“So are you one?” he asked.

He might as well have asked if I was the devil. It sounded exactly like that.

“No,” I lied. “I swear, I’m not.”

Even to my own ears, it sounded less like I was trying to convince him and more like a desperate attempt to convince myself.

* * *

Brian and I never talked about it again. He acted as if nothing had happened, and I was grateful for the lie. As far as I know, he never told anyone, and I never breathed a word. Even Jeff seemed none the wiser. And so the three of us kept being best friends as if nothing had changed—even though everything had.

What lingers in my memory about those last weeks is the disorienting sense of being

both present and already gone—like spotting yourself in a photograph taken in a place you have no recollection of ever being. I moved through the same rooms, sat at the same lunch table, laughed at the same jokes as I always had, and yet now felt more observer than participant. And worst of all, in those moments when Brian and I were together, I wanted nothing more than to be neither one.

By the end of the school year, all I wanted was to put my life in East Carlisle behind

me. The hope of starting anew was the only thing that sustained me.

Brian, Jeff and I met up in his basement for the last time two weeks before my mother and I left for good. I’d thought we’d see each again the following Saturday, but Brian cancelled -- claiming that he had a team meeting he’d forgotten about -- and then I told Jeff that I should probably beg off too because we were getting an early start to Florida the next day.

“Okay,” Jeff said. “Good luck down there, Ethan. We’re going to miss you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

Brian never called to say goodbye. I could have called him, but I didn’t.

* * *

Turns out I was the Gordie of my friend group because I became a writer. If the Stand By Me character was based on Stephen King, then the comparison is a little less on the nose. None of my books have been made into movies, and I can almost guarantee you’ve never heard of me. But my work earns me a fair living, I’ve won some writing awards, and my friends get a kick out of seeing my characters bear their names.

I mentioned Mr. Redmond in the acknowledgments of my first novel. My guess is he didn’t read it. He likely doesn’t even know it exists.

If I could find him, I would. I can’t. Believe me, I’ve tried.

The last I ever heard from him came a few weeks after I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, when he mailed back my story about a boy who falls in love with his best friend. I’d written it earlier that spring, but spent weeks debating whether to share it, finally handing it to him on the last day of school as a kind of thank-you.

Mr. Redmond provided his usual red-lining—word-choice tweaks and the tightening of certain phrases—but it’s what he wrote at the end that I’ve read so many times over the years I’ve committed it to memory: “Ethan, at a very young age, you’ve embraced the essence that great writing is a baring of the soul that allows the writer to transform something deeply personal into a universal truth.”

These days my soul lives in Northern California, in a town with echoes of East Carlisle—commuting distance from the city and a stone’s throw from a state university campus. But while the surroundings feel familiar, I live a life I couldn’t have imagined back then. It’s one I share with Spencer, my husband, our two sons—Danny is thirteen, Andy is eleven—and a rescue dog named Agatha Christie because Spencer is a mystery buff.

As the movie credits begin to roll and Ben E. King croons about not shedding a tear should mountains crumble to the sea, I hear Spencer’s slightly off-key baritone belting out the chorus. When I turn, he smiles, and that never fails to make me smile too.

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” he says.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Stand By Me,” he says, nodding at the television. “A classic.”

Spencer knows about Brian, of course. About Mr. Redmond too.

He doesn’t reference either of them. Instead—as he almost always does—he says the exact right thing.

“I wish I’d known you when we were twelve.”

“Maybe it would have saved me some heartache.”

He shakes his head. “On second thought, I’m glad you came into my life exactly when you did. I’m grateful for everyone before me—they made you the man I love.”

Then he kisses me, and for the millionth time I’m reminded how a true kiss can bring you back to who you are—and, strangely, make you grateful for the pain that shaped you.

My daughter was born, stopped breathing for I don’t know how long, and was placed in a medically induced coma -- all within twenty minutes.

Everyone had promised me that her birth would be the happiest day of my life. And for a few blissful minutes, it was. From the instant I saw her, a calm settled over me unlike anything I’d ever known. I saw only the life ahead of us—Halloween costumes and cookie sheets, school recitals and proms, graduations, weddings, even grandchildren.

Then all of it vanished. Replaced by a horror I had never allowed myself to imagine.

I am a worrier by nature. Things other people do without a second thought have always pulled my mind toward danger. My work as a lawyer has only sharpened that reflex; when you spend your days cataloguing catastrophic accidents, you learn to fear the worst outcome, no matter how remote.

Knowing this about myself, I was quick to accuse my own eyes of lying — a trick of the light, or just the exhaustion settling into my bones. But despite every effort to keep my fears at bay, the unease swelled into full-fledged panic.

“Does she seem a little blueish to you?” I finally heard myself say.

Nicole turned to me, and with a smile as radiant as I’d ever seen, she said, “She’s perfect, Alex. There’s no need to worry.”

I have no idea how much time elapsed as I tried to convince myself she was right. It felt interminable, but I can’t imagine it was more than another minute.

“Can I hold her?” I asked.

It was a ruse. I wasn’t seeking bonding time but a better vantage point. Nicole’s sigh signaled her annoyance, and I couldn’t blame her. After she’d endured the hours of labor while I sat idly by offering her only ice chips, I was now disturbing her first moment of peace.

For another stretch—how long, I couldn’t fairly estimate—we were locked in a kind of stalemate. Nicole seemed to be weighing whether to grant my request, perhaps hoping I’d withdraw it, while my outstretched arms made clear I wouldn’t.

Finally, her body shifted. She let out a small, involuntary wince, a reminder of what I already knew too well: she had pushed this life out of her body mere minutes earlier, and I was now asking her to move again. But by then, I didn’t even consider retreating. Whatever concern I had for my wife had been overtaken entirely by fear for our daughter.

All of that is etched in my mind. But the minutes that followed are gone. The next thing I remember is a doctor I’d never seen before pressing his index and middle fingers into Rebecca’s abdomen while a nurse held a tiny oxygen balloon over my baby’s mouth and nose with urgent precision.

I once believed prayers and lies lived at opposite ends of a spectrum. Prayers were what we asked for—health, safety, a miracle. Lies were what we hid—our weaknesses, our fears, our failures. But in that moment, I understood they can be the same thing: desperate words spoken because the truth is unbearable.

* * *

For a moment in the mayhem, I felt torn between staying beside my sobbing wife or following the doctors who were working on our unconscious daughter. Then Nicole made the choice for me.

“Go with her,” she said. “I don’t want her to die all alone.”

If you’ve never set foot in a NICU, count yourself fortunate. They are the mirror image of a hospital nursery: where one is full of pink, round-faced newborns, the other holds frail, tadpole-thin babies with gray skin, many of them lying under the purple tint of ultraviolet lamps.

Rebecca looked enormous beside the preemies, yet no less distressed. Wires ran through her abdomen to monitor her vital signs, and she lay absolutely still. It was clear she wasn’t asleep, but poised at the precipice of death.

At the top right corner of her incubator was a card depicting a cartoon stork smoking a cigar, with preprinted lines for name, date, length, and weight, all filled in by hand: Baby Girl Miller. October 13. 20 inches. 7 lbs. It should have been the least of my concerns, but I yanked it from its slot.

A moment later, I found myself standing before a middle-aged woman in large glasses and a white uniform at a small table just outside the NICU’s double glass doors. She clearly hadn’t been watching me inside; she startled when I appeared in front of her.

“I’d like to write my daughter’s name on the card,” I said.

“If you want,” she replied, as if the request surprised her.

“Yes, please. So that you and the other nurses and doctors know her name.”

She handed me a pen and clipboard. I had to consciously remind myself it was spelled with one b and two c’s, and my hand shook as I formed the letters.

“Her name is Rebecca,” I said.

Until that moment, I had guarded the name like a state secret, keeping the promise Nicole and I made not to share it before the birth. I half expected the nurse to smile, to say it was a beautiful name, maybe even ask how we’d chosen it. Instead, she offered only a wan smile and held out her hand, waiting for me to return the pen and clipboard.

* * *

“We’ve put her in a medically induced coma.”

The words came an hour later, delivered by a different doctor than the one who had resuscitated Rebecca. Like him, she was younger than I was, and—judging from my limited medical knowledge, most of it gleaned from television—I assumed she was a resident.

“When a newborn seizes, we do this to reduce the risk of brain damage,” she said, her voice as flat as a news report. “The protocol is to minimize brain activity.”

I asked the questions that came to me—How long will she be like this? What happens after that?—only to be told that the attending physician would discuss it during her rounds. But even she wouldn’t be able to answer the only question I still couldn’t bring myself to ask: Will my baby survive?

When I returned to Nicole, her eyes were rimmed red. What unsettled me wasn’t that she’d been crying, but the vacancy in her expression—the look of someone who had been lost in the woods for weeks.

“How is she?” Nicole asked, barely a whisper.

“She’s sleeping now,” I said, trying to smile for us both. “The doctor said she’s stable.”

Until that moment, I’d held tight to the idea that this was all following a kind of movie logic—terror only as a setup for the inevitable relief at the end. But in my wife’s face, I saw the truth: we might not come out of this whole.

* * *

Dr. Bhandari was an older woman—though not truly old, probably in her forties—and I felt an unexpected surge of relief at the sight of a doctor who looked like a grown-up.

“I’m Rebecca’s father,” I said, unnecessarily. “We’ve been told you could help us understand her condition and what we should expect.”

No one had actually told us that, and I was fairly sure Dr. Bhandari knew it. Still, she offered a small, professional smile and said, “From her chart, I see she suffered oxygen deprivation at birth.”

“Not exactly at birth,” I said. “She scored 9.9 on the Apgar test. It was ten or fifteen minutes after birth that she stopped breathing.”

“The protocol is to sedate in order to limit brain activity, which we’ve done,” she said. “The first twenty-four hours are when she’s in the most danger. After that, the risk of fatality lessens, though she won’t be out of the woods yet.”

Fatality hung in the air like smoke—impossible to ignore, just as suffocating. And it made me see those woods as something real: a dark terrain filled with threats that, even if not fatal, could still rob my daughter of the life she was meant to have.

“Let me explain what will happen over the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” Dr. Bhandari said. “Tomorrow we’ll start reducing the medications keeping her in the coma. If she seizes again, we’ll sedate her and try the next day. That can happen, so be prepared. If the seizures stop—or even after three or four days if they don’t—we’ll do an MRI. It may show whether there’s been any brain damage. I say may because with newborns it doesn’t always appear right away. There can be false negatives.”

I’d spent my career parsing language, dissecting contracts until every clause yielded its secrets—the trap the other side hoped you wouldn’t notice until the ink was dry. So I understood exactly what she wasn’t saying: good news could vanish in a moment; bad news would be permanent.

After Dr. Bhandari left, I sat beside my daughter and did something I hadn’t done since I was a child: I closed my eyes, bowed my head, and prayed to a God I had long since abandoned. And, being a lawyer, I tried to offer consideration—anything to make the bargain binding. I would give up everything I had or ever would have—my life, my future, even my happiness—if the Almighty would spare my daughter.

* * *

Nicole was still asleep when I returned to her room. A nurse told me they’d sedated her. I spent the next hour beside her, watching her enjoy a peace I knew would vanish the moment her eyes opened.

When they did, she offered the easy smile of someone whose world hadn’t yet fallen apart, someone who still believed the day ahead was a good one.

“What time is it?” she asked, her voice thick, her eyes unfocused.

“It’s a little after five,” I said. “I spent most of the night with Rebecca. She’s still the same, which is good.”

The smile drained from Nicole’s face, replaced first by confusion, then by something far worse—recognition. For a heartbeat, neither of us spoke. There was only that heavy, suspended moment when memory collided with reality, and all I could do was stand there, helpless, as she remembered the new terms of her life.

“I need to see her,” Nicole said.

“The nurses said you have to stay in bed.”

Nicole had always been inclined to follow rules. But not now.

“I don’t care,” she said.

Without waiting for my assent, she pressed her hands against the mattress, as if sheer will alone could lift her. Pain spread across her face, and for a moment I thought about stopping her. But she wouldn’t be denied, and so I helped her into the wheelchair.

In the NICU, Nicole put her face so close to the incubator that I wondered how she could even see. “I’m sorry, Becca,” she said, her voice jagged, tears streaming down her face. “I’m so sorry.”

Her words gave voice to what I felt but had been afraid to say—that she, too, believed she’d failed Rebecca. You’d think that might have made me feel less alone, but it didn’t. If anything, hearing Nicole say it out loud made my failure feel even more real.

* * *

I somehow managed to fall asleep, only to wake with the jolt of a single thought: my daughter hadn’t survived the night. I raced down the hallway, my heart hammering, every step both too slow and out of control, like running in a dream where the destination refuses to draw closer. All I could imagine was the worst—that Rebecca’s incubator would be empty, or that she’d be there, lifeless.

But she was there. And alive.

Her breathing tube had been removed, allowing her tiny chest to rise and fall in a steady rhythm all on its own. Relief washed through me—the first hint that she might someday leave this place—even as the faint beep of the monitors reminded me how fragile she still was, how carefully her heart was being watched.

* * *

A part of me expected Rebecca to seize the moment the medication was reduced. When she didn’t, I turned to the nurse, hoping for some sign that she’d passed this test. But she shook her head gently and said, “We won’t know for a few hours. Sometimes it takes a little while.”

For the rest of the morning, Nicole and I sat beside our daughter, watching her with a vigilance born of terror, searching for the smallest twitch we didn’t want to see. We barely spoke. There was no need. We both knew the thought running through us both—quiet, exhausted prayers that this ordeal might finally be loosening its grip.

* * *

The MRI room was cold and sterile, as if designed to strip away warmth. Because the machine was on a different floor from the maternity ward, the hospital insisted Nicole couldn’t be there to watch the procedure. She put up a mild protest, then let it go. I sensed she’d already made her private bargain—not to ask for anything except that her prayers be answered.

Rebecca was swaddled tightly in the pink-and-blue striped blanket, and I watched the nurse place her on a narrow conveyor, her tiny body gliding away from me until she disappeared into the machine. I’d imagined the process would take only minutes, like a dental X-ray, but nearly an hour passed before she reemerged.

The moment she did, I brought my lips to her head, breathing in her scent as if it were oxygen necessary for my survival. It had been at least two days since her birth, though time had long since stopped being measurable. What mattered was this: it was the first time I’d ever kissed my daughter.

A voice behind me made me jump. “I’m Dr. Cammeron.”

He was tall, with a full beard and a bald head rimmed by a horseshoe of dark hair. Even though I didn’t want to slow him down, I told him my name—that I was Rebecca’s father. He nodded once and said, “The MRI didn’t show any signs of trauma. That’s good. But with newborns, sometimes an injury doesn’t appear yet. We only see it later, when other signs develop.”

I just stared at him, unable to make sense of what he was saying. He must have seen the confusion—or the desperation—because he softened and said, “This is good news. The best we can have right now. There’s nothing on the scan to suggest damage to your daughter’s brain. I just have to caution that it doesn’t guarantee there isn’t any. But obviously, it would have been much worse if we’d seen something concerning.”

I might have let the good news take hold, desperate for any break in the fear, but fatherhood had already rearranged my wiring. I now understood that hope could be both lifeline and weapon—the very thing that kept you upright while simultaneously positioning you for devastation.

* * *

The next day, we took our baby home. Before we left, the hospital gave us a small heart-monitor band, hardly bigger than a bracelet, that wrapped easily around Rebecca’s chest. When it was silent, her heart was beating. When it erupted, it meant something might be terribly wrong.

As if she were testing us, Rebecca had an unusually low resting heartbeat, and the monitor shrieked every time she slipped into deep sleep. It never stirred her, but Nicole and I would sprint into her room, already bracing for the worst. Only when we pinched her—sometimes more than once—did her eyes finally flutter open, followed by a furious wail that easily outmatched the alarm.

We visited the pediatric neurologist every month. Each time, I hoped we’d finally hear that she was in the clear, but the doctor would only say, “See you next time.” It wasn’t until her second birthday—after Nicole and I had long since reassured ourselves through Rebecca’s everyday exuberance—that her doctor finally agreed with us.

* * *

Not long after we reached that milestone, Nicole and I turned to the other threat facing our family. Our marriage counselor, Bill, was a man in his mid-sixties, average in nearly every way. He spoke softly and without judgment—traits I assumed he’d earned through decades of listening.

In his office, Nicole and I were careful to stay civil. Sometimes I wondered if Bill questioned why we were there at all, though the fact that he never asked made me think he understood more than he let on.

After a few sessions, he said, “You’ve told me a little about your daughter’s birth, but when you talk about it, you do it in a very detached way—almost like you’re describing something that happened to someone else. It might help to talk to each other about what you felt then. Nicole, would you start?”

Nicole’s hands, which had been resting loosely on her lap, tightened into fists. She stared straight ahead, as if she couldn’t even bare the sight of me.

“There’s really not too much to say. Just that Alex thinks I suffocated our baby.”

This was the fault line Nicole and I had been tiptoeing along ever since that day. We’d both been careful not to press too hard, afraid the ground might split beneath us and swallow us whole. But now that it lay bare, I saw it for what it was—a vast chasm, and suddenly the space between us felt enormous.

While everything was still so raw, in the hours – literally maybe less than two – after Rebecca’s birth, the hospital administrator had asked to see us. The lawyer in me knew that this meeting was not for our benefit. The hospital wanted to see if we’d make an admission that would limit its malpractice exposure.

So, I insisted with Nicole that we have a consistent story. After I described what I’d seen – that Rebecca was fine and the nurse must have incorrectly placed on Nicole’s breast, rendering Rebecca unable to breathe – Nicole’s only response was to say, “That’s not what happened.”

She never offered another version, and we never met with the hospital administrator. Like the way veterans don’t discuss the horrors of war, Nicole and I made a tacit agreement to never speak about those first few minutes of our daughter’s life, and we’d largely adhered to that, sharing our daughter’s birth story in precisely the dispassionate tone we’d used with Bill that he’d apparently found symptomatic of trauma.

“I don’t,” I said—speaking to Bill, because saying it directly to Nicole would have felt like another betrayal. “Here’s what I saw: Rebecca was fine. The nurse put her on Nicole to breastfeed. Not too long after, I noticed she was turning blue. I said so. Nicole said I was wrong. When Nicole finally handed her to me, Rebecca wasn’t breathing.”

“You always need someone to blame — everyone but you,” Nicole said in a way that was so angry I was concerned she might spit in my face. “You’re always the hero in this story. I’m the villain who wouldn’t listen to you. But sometimes bad things happen and no one is to blame. I googled it. It’s called H-I-E. One in ten babies don’t get enough oxygen during labor and stop breathing. It just happens.”

I knew in that moment what Nicole likely had for some time – that neither of us had ever left that hospital room. To me, my wife was the woman who dismissed my fears when our daughter was dying. To her, I was the man who would always unfairly blame her for something that wasn’t even remotely her fault.

* * *

A week later, Nicole and I went into Rebecca’s room. She was playing with a doll that had been her favorite for the past year, and we asked her to sit on her toddler bed, as we lowered ourselves onto the floor.

It was a short conversation, following a script that Nicole had found in a book. We told Rebecca that we both loved her and that would never change. That we would be there for her, always. That this had nothing to do with her, but that sometimes mommies and daddies decide that it’s best for their family if they do not live together. That we knew she would be sad. That we were sad too.

She asked logistical questions. Where would she live? We’d already told her that, but we repeated the answer as if we hadn’t. Would she be able to see her mother when she was with me? Sometimes, and by phone whenever she wanted. Did she have to tell anyone? We would tell her pre-school teachers, but she didn’t have to say anything if she didn’t want, and she could tell whoever she wanted if that felt right to her.

I knew even then that years later she’d recall this exact moment with the same clarity that I remembered those days in the hospital. Although she was too young to fully grasp the stakes, she was old enough to know that something irreversible had occurred, and that the narrative of her life had suddenly been cleaved into a before and after. Beyond that, she’d learned a lesson I’d never wished to teach: that nothing, not even family, is safe, and that those who promised never to hurt you cannot be trusted to keep their word.

* * *

I am an involved father — present in my daughter’s life. People say that’s better than being at home and distant, as if those were the only two options.

Hardly a day passes when I don’t replay some fragment of Rebecca’s birth. About once a week I have a nightmare connected to it, never the same twice. The other night I dreamt I’d left her in a hot car and returned to find she’d melted. In others she’s trapped under ice, or floating away from me into the sky.

I always wake with my heart racing, a bead of sweat sliding down my temple, the echo of her crying out to me in my ears. For a few disoriented seconds, it seems real, and then the rush of relief when I remember it was a dream, and she’s fine, sleeping peacefully, either in my apartment or across town at Nicole’s.

Still, even my waking hours are often haunted by the ways I’ve failed her. I do my best to assuage my guilt with the claim that it was best for Rebecca not to be reared in a house in which her parents didn’t love each other, even though I’m far from sure that’s true. What I couldn’t deny – what caused me to ask Nicole for a divorce in the end – was my conviction that I’d be happier that way.

Rebecca’s birth story is one I rarely tell. It’s not because I have no interest in revisiting the abject terror I experienced, although that might be part of it. Nor is my reluctance because I know that I don’t come out well even in my version of events, although that is also true. Rather, when I’m finished, my listener invariably concludes that the tale ends happily, which is not at all my takeaway from the ordeal. That’s just the lie we have no choice but to tell ourselves when our prayers are answered.