“Bedtime for the future Nationals’ captain,” Julie said. She had the delicate, elegant look of a ballerina; her movements possessed the same lithe grace; and as she took Danny from me and left the kitchen, I watched Alex follow her with his eyes.

Alex said, “Dad, what’re you grinning about?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? No way. What is it?”

Behind me I heard Glenna walk over from the sink. Then she was standing next to Alex’s chair and resting a hand on his shoulder.

She said, “He means it’s everything.”

“Everything?” Alex asked.

“Everything,” I said.

Alex chuckled. “You’re talking code again. I don’t get it.”

I stood and kissed the top of his head. “You will.”

WHEN I woke up, the clock on my nightstand read 5:59. I thought I’d heard Danny crying, but Julie must have gotten up to nurse him because the house was quiet. Glenna murmured in her sleep, and I slipped out of bed, pulled on a sweatshirt and shorts, stepped into my moccasins, took my reading glasses and my laptop off my dresser, and went downstairs.

Fifteen minutes later I was sitting outside at the wrought-iron table we’d set up under the oaks. The birds were singing, and the rose light of dawn had lightened the sky to lavender and streaked the shoestring clouds with crimson. I sipped coffee from a travel mug and, after the computer booted up, began rereading my novel from the beginning. In the warm weather, I occasionally wrote out here, but I’d done most of the work up on the third floor. We had the entertainment center moved to the living room and the treadmill and Universal to the basement, and Glenna had bought me a mahogany, U-shaped desk to match her own. I offered to pay, but she said no, and when I told her that she was being overly generous, she laughed, saying, “Not really. I expect you to keep my stuff organized,” which I would have done anyway, since the books, journals, and mail heaped up on her desk, the couch, and the floor edged me toward insanity. Writing the novel had been a struggle, but working in a room so laden with my past, I frequently had the giddy, improbable sense that the man I’d become was watching the boy I’d been pass through his days and nights.

I heard the front door open, and Glenna came out in a yellow polo shirt, denim cutoffs, and a beat-up pair of buffalo sandals. Whenever I saw her dressed as I remembered from so long ago, I had this wonderful feeling that our time together had been unbroken.

“Do I get to read the ending?” she asked, sitting at the table and running her hand over my arm.

“I’ll print out the last chapter for you,” I said, and offered her my mug.

She took a sip. “I’m going to make Jennifer a partner.”

Glenna had been mulling over that decision for the last year, and I asked her what made her finally decide to do it.