He picked his leather folder up off the wicker table, uncapped the fountain pen from his breast pocket and jotted a short line across the top of a memo sheet.

“Does your firm have an office here in town?” I asked.

“Not yet, no,” Evan said.

By nine the rain had eased into a soft drizzle against the kitchen window.

I went to the hall linen closet and took out the gray cardboard box I kept behind the extra blankets on the bottom shelf.

Inside were four worn spiral notebooks full of Evan’s high school algebra formulas and essay drafts.

I’d rescued them from the wastebasket in his room ten years earlier, the night before he packed his trunk for his first year of college.