“I do,” I said, feeling that maybe I’d broken the ice a bit with Trimble. If he was willing to make fun of Colby, he couldn’t be all bad. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to check in with you once a day, see if you’ve got anything. And if I’ve got something, I’ll call you.”

“Anytime,” Trimble said. There was a pause. He added, “Night or day.”

“Deal,” I said.

I’d barely replaced the receiver when the phone rang.

“Hey,” said Sarah. “We’re on a break here. This guy from the newspaper association is telling us how to listen to our reporters’ concerns, to imagine how they must feel when their copy is chopped to ribbons, as a way of making a newsroom more harmonious. I want to feed this guy into a paper shredder. How’s Lawrence doing?”

“Holding his own, I think. Not great, but not getting worse.”

“Have you seen him?”

“I went there this afternoon, a couple of hours ago.”

“How’d he look?”

“Bad.”

“Y’able to talk to him at all?”

I paused. “Only a little. I did most of the talking. He’s hooked up to a lot of machines and shit. Looks like a Borg.”

“Huh?” Sarah, not a Star Trek fan, missed the reference. “I’m outa here tomorrow, after the morning session. Should be back home late afternoon, unless I decide to pop into the office first.”

“Don’t bother. Just come home. We miss you.”

Maybe it was something about Letitia’s story about looking after Lawrence when they were young, but more and more, I was appreciating that the only sure thing that protected us from the bad things out there were the people closest to us.

I wrote my story, let Nancy know it had been filed and updated with a call to Trimble, and left the building. The Virtue started for me just like that. Good ol’ Otto. He knew what he was doing. I decided to stop on the way home for some groceries. Maybe, just maybe, there’d be a chance for me, Angie, and Paul to have a meal together.

The cross street at the bottom of Crandall is a busy thoroughfare lined with shops, cafés, restaurants, and a small theater that shows second-run stuff. It was a nice day, and the cafés had moved some tables and chairs out onto the sidewalks. I found a spot by the curb and went in Angelo’s Fruit Market and bought the makings of a salad, then went next door, to the fresh pasta place, for some linguine and a tomato-Alfredo sauce, and as I was coming back out I glanced in the direction of the café two doors down, where there were half a dozen tables out front, and thought I recognized the person sitting with his back to me, fiddling with a laptop computer.