JULIAN

The question was four words.

I had been given questions that were designed to reach me before. People tried. Some of them had tried with sophistication and some with bluntness and some with the specific and accumulated intelligence of people who had known me for a long time and understood the terrain. Richard had asked me once, after the divorce, in the specific and careful way of a man who had watched the proceedings from the legal trench and had earned a question. Nate had not asked, which was its own form of intelligence, Nate had understood from the beginning that the not-asking was more useful, that the knowing...