Some animal part of him recognized it as a thing that mattered, even if he couldn’t have said why.

“What’s that?” he asked.

I looked at him for a moment.

“Something,” I said, “you should have read before you told me to leave.”

He laughed.

Of course he laughed; he had been laughing off the consequences of his own choices for as long as I’d known him, and it had always worked, because I had always been standing behind him quietly absorbing them.

I didn’t laugh.