As the winter darkness fell, I sat at my desk rereading the same paragraph in a search and seizure opinion over and over. I blamed my inability to concentrate on everything but the elation that flushed my chest when I thought of seeing Adam. I was reluctant to look too closely at what lay beneath my excitement because I knew it was more than the prospect of getting laid. Until I’d met Hugh Paris, sex had been little more than an appetite I fed when it began to distract me from what I believed was the only part of my life that mattered—getting justice for my clients. Then Hugh had come along, the beautiful, damaged man I had fallen in love with. Together he and I discovered that the heat of passion could cauterize the old wounds inflicted on men like us from the time we became aware of being different. He told me that the first time we made love, he had looked into my eyes and felt forgiven. I knew what he meant because I felt forgiven, too—forgiven for loving him, for the times I had hated myself, and for ever having believed I was defective. In that naked tangle of breath and bodies, a healing flowed.

Adam, I reminded myself, wasn’t Hugh. He wasn’t gay. All he wanted and all he was offering was companionable sex. If, when we were together, I felt a flush of what I’d felt with Hugh that was—what? My imagination? My problem? I shoved the thought aside. The sex had been good, and I liked Adam. That had to be enough.

At six-thirty, I closed my books and headed to Blessed Savior for the seven o’clock AA meeting. Like most meetings it had been nicknamed by its attendees and it was called, waggishly, It’s Come to This. Outside the parish hall, huddled like a band of aging juvenile delinquents, were the smokers still grumbling about the group’s decision to make It’s Come to This a non-smoking meeting. Scarves and leather jackets warded off the winter chill and out of the knot of men I heard someone call my name.

“Hello, Simon,” I said, approaching a small, thin, snowy-haired man in a shearling coat and paisley silk scarf smoking a black, gold-tipped Sobranie. He favored me with his elfin grin and pale eyes. He was a retired psychiatrist, almost seventy, who had stopped drinking on his sixtieth birthday because, he said, “I’d been everything but ordinary and I wanted to know what that felt like before they dump me into the grave.”

“Young Henry,” he said. “You have a spring in your step. Could it be love?”

Simon, I now recalled, combined perspicuity with a sharp tongue.

“No, I’m just happy to see you.”