“Yeah. She called me at my parents’ house a couple of days later—Sauer must have told her about my visit. I recognized her voice immediately even though she sounded like she’d been through the wringer a few times, which no doubt she has.”

He paused, looking a bit blank suddenly, as if he’d lost his thread. Or possibly he was just exhausted.

“What did she say?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t remember exactly. Something about me being vindictive, wrecking her one chance at getting back in the game, I don’t know. She wasn’t very coherent.”

“She must have known you weren’t going to like the article . . .”

He shrugged.

“I guess she hadn’t considered it from my point of view. Maybe Sauer never told her I was putting up a fight. Though he did get her to change that one line. Well, who knows? Anyway, that’s how I learned they’d pulled the piece.”

“It must have been weird, talking to her after all these years . . .”

“Extremely weird.”

“Was she . . . was her point just that you’d stopped her getting published, or was it still about the, you know, the accusation itself?”

He looked nettled for a moment, but then nodded somberly as though to acknowledge an obligation to satisfy my curiosity. I was his appointed auditor, after all.

“Well, both,” he said, clearing his throat.

“So you talked about it? The accusation?”

“I mean, nothing new. She said what she’d written was true and that she had a right to publish it, and I told her it wasn’t and she didn’t. That’s basically all.” He closed his lips, breathing in through his nose, his fierce features expressing the affronted dignity that I’d come to recognize as his way of showing pain. After a moment, he added:

“But I guess hearing her say it, hearing her actual voice in my ear telling me I’d made her do something she didn’t want to do, was different from reading it in Sauer’s email.”

“You mean more . . . real?”

“Something like that.” He smiled dryly. “She hung up on me before we could get too deeply into it.”

The waitress came to refill our glasses, and he paused, observing her with his coolly appraising eye as she poured and withdrew.

“Look,” he said, “I don’t get satisfaction from the thought of Julia being upset, however much she maligned me. That I can promise you.”

I believed him, and said so.

“On the other hand,” he said, “defeating Sauer after the shit he put me through—that was pure joy!”

I raised my glass. I wasn’t certain I’d extracted every significant nuance of his conversation with Julia, but I felt I’d pushed him as far as I could without spoiling the atmosphere.

“Well, to victory,” I said.

“To victory!”