Mason is cheating!”

“I am NOT cheating,” Mason protested with enormous dignity.

“It’s an engineering strategy.”

David laughed — a real laugh, warm and full, a completely different sound from the hollow ghost of a chuckle I had heard across a diner table a year before.

I got up off the couch.

“Sounds like you two need an impartial referee,” I said, and I lowered myself down onto the floor beside my grandsons.