"I'm going to take a walk," I said.
He didn't stand up. He didn't follow. He stayed in the chair the way I had stayed in chairs when I needed him to stay -- present, available, not pursuing.
I had learned that from him.
I hated, right now, how much I had learned from him.
* * *
New Orleans in the early evening was the version I had come to know best: the heat going out of the day but the warmth staying in the stones and the wood and the wrought iron, the light going the color of old photographs, the city settling into its after-work self with the unhurried confidence of something that had been doing this for three centuries and had no plans to change.
I walked for an hour.
I walked past the house where I had first understood that Dominic Moreau was more than a problem to be managed. Pastthe corner where I had called Cleo on a Tuesday morning and said I think I'm in trouble, meaning the investigation, and Cleo had said which kind, and I had not known how to answer. Past the live oak on the boulevard that was older than the street itself, its roots breaking the sidewalk with the patience of something that had decided to stay.
I thought about a nineteen-year-old boy finding a folder in his dead father's papers.
I thought about carrying something for twelve years not knowing what to do with it.
I thought about: I needed you to arrive at it.
I thought about my mother in a courthouse doorway in October 2000, doing the work I had chosen to do, at the cost I had chosen to pay.
I thought about my own choices.
I thought: he was wrong to withhold it. I thought: he was not wrong about why.
I thought: these can both be true.
* * *
I came home at eight.
He was in the kitchen. He had made something -- I could smell it, something that had been on the stove for a while, the domestic evidence of a man who had not known what else to do with the hours.
He looked up when I came in. He didn't speak.
I sat at the kitchen table.
"You should have told me," I said.
"Yes."
"Earlier. Before I asked."
"Yes."
"I need you to understand that the withholding -- regardless of the reason -- is a choice I needed to make myself. Not you."
He set down the spoon. He looked at me with the full quality of his attention, the kind that did not hedge.
"I understand that," he said. "I was wrong."
I held his gaze for a long moment.
I thought: he knew, and he came to our apartment anyway. He knew, and he sat across from a lawyer and made it formal. He knew about my mother and he looked at my father and chose me, with the full weight of what that history contained.
I thought: I do not know yet what to do with that.