He was not looking at me. “That’s the confession. It isn’t that I missed it. I saw it, and I made a decision, and the decision was that I needed you to be all right more than I needed to know.”

The gulls were doing their thing over the water.

“Why have you never said that?”

“Because you had a trial to get through,” he said. “And then you had a business. And because guilt is only useful if you turn it into action, which is a very good line that I have used on you at least three times and which I now think is mostly a way of not sitting still.”

We walked. He bought two coffees from the stand at the end and did not say anything for another quarter mile.

“I’ll tell you the thing that actually keeps me up,” he said. “It isn’t 2017. It’s that you got out on your own.