Two years earlier he would have answered it. He would have written something careful and generous that cost him something and gave Scott a door, and then he would have lain awake.

He did not answer it.

He also did not block the number, and he has thought about why, and the honest answer is that he is not entirely finished being a person who leaves a door open, and that he has decided this is survivable as long as he knows he is doing it.

Chapter 17 — Fifty-Second Street

Daniel Brennan learned to stop saying it’s okay on a Tuesday in October, in a kitchen, over a burned pan of rice.

It was nothing. That’s what he wants recorded. It was a Tuesday and Lily had put rice on and gone to answer a call and it had gone black on the bottom, and she came back in and said, “Oh — Dad, I’m sorry, I ruined it.”

And he opened his mouth to say it’s okay — the way he had said it in a hospital restroom at 6:19 p.m. two years earlier with both hands over his mouth, the way he had said it to Patricia for forty years, the way he had said it to Scott across twenty thousand dollars —