He had become the chairman of the Reed-Hartwell Foundation, the national organization whose money built and sustained the research wing of the very clinic I was now a patient in.

The neighborhood ghost, the man Julian mocked, was one of the reasons a place like the Hartwell Center existed at all.

I asked him about it that evening, gently, and he told me the rest of it in as few words as he could manage, looking not at me but at the middle distance, the way people do when they are handling something that still has edges.

His wife and his daughter had died, years before, in an accident.

He did not describe it, and I did not ask.

He had been, he said, one of the most capable men in the world at moving medical care to where it was needed, and he had not been able to save the two people he loved most, and he had lived with that arithmetic every day since.