Nine years of feud, and it did not take an apology tour or a mediator or a careful accounting of who had wronged whom.

It took about forty minutes in a county lobby, over the body of a sleeping child, for the entire architecture of our estrangement to become irrelevant.

I do not want to make it sound as though everything between Arthur and me was instantly and perfectly healed; there were conversations still to have, old hurts still to name, a relationship to slowly rebuild over the months and years that followed.

But the war was over.