“Oh — a couple of years, I suppose.”

He looked up at me, genuinely scandalized.

“You’ve been walking on a broken step for two years?”

“I suppose I enjoy living dangerously,” I said.

“You’re completely ridiculous,” he said, and there was something new in how he said it — easy, almost familial, the teasing of a boy who was beginning to feel at home enough to tease.

Within twenty minutes he had the board secured, solid, better than it had been in years.

And I stood watching him work, and I understood something about him that the thick file had entirely missed.