Derek’s father had grown quieter around me, which I had initially read as sulking and had slowly come to understand as something closer to shame, the kind a proud man carries and will never once mention.

He did not apologize.

Men like him almost never do; the apology arrives disguised as a changed behavior, and you learn to accept the disguise because the alternative is to wait forever for words that were never going to come.

He stopped calling me by the nickname.

He started, occasionally, asking how my work was going, and listening to a sentence or two of the answer before his attention drifted, which from him was practically a sonnet.

So when the invitation came for his birthday — his sixty-sixth, a year on from the one that had detonated my life and then, improbably, rebuilt it — I did not feel the old dread.