LENA

He told me about his father first.

Not as preamble, not in the way of a man who was building toward something and needed to establish the context. In the way of someone who understood that the story began before the event that was usually called the beginning. Thomas Blackwood at forty-one, which was younger than I had assembled him in my mind, which was the first adjustment the story required of me. Younger and, in Julian's telling, different, not the man who had a dinner at the Aldrich Club and said well done, you're still sharp with the specific temperature of a man who did not acknowledge the...