“About Max?” I was incredulous. “Never,” I told him, with certainty. “Max, out of anyone I’ve ever met, knows what she needs and how to get it.” I’d never thought of Max as being fragile or confused or in danger of anything at all, but then again—I realized that we barely knew each other anymore. Max could be one big performance, and I would never know the difference. “Why do you ask? I mean…besides the fact that she’s physically isolated and you’re always out of town. She seems happy to be working on that book.”

“I guess I don’t have a reason. A feeling…I don’t mean to be paranoid.” He trailed off. “It’s probably down to the house. I love this house. But it’s not hers.”

We sat in silence as I poured us both fresh glasses of wine.

“I think the impulse to make a home that belongs to you both is probably a good one,” I said, as sincerely as I could. He nodded and began eating, scooping up huge forkfuls of duck and potatoes while I stared out at the yard. Orange rays sliced across the green grass from the west, shadows pooling under the trees. We drank a second glass, then a third. The wine flowed through me, hot like blood, and the whole world transformed from a drab gray outline into full-scale Kodachrome color. I felt everything: the dusk in the air, Charlie’s smile across the table, the glass between my fingers, the wine on my tongue, the clean smell of the evening dew, so faint that were dew a color it would be the water in the jar where you rinse your watercolor brush.

After that we returned to small talk, enjoying the night air, trading war stories about expensive professional mistakes we’d made. I got the sense that he didn’t know many people with whom he could discuss the real details of his life; and whether I had earned it or not, my history with Max placed me in a family-like proximity that genuinely meant something to him. It made me feel terrible, how easily he trusted me, because I didn’t deserve it. At last—when we were halfway through a second bottle, glasses four and five—I confessed something I’d been holding on to for years, the fingers of my brain too drunk and guilty to hold their secrets any longer. Courage grew from the base of my spine and bubbled out my mouth.

“Do you remember when we met?” I asked.

“At that party, downtown. The one with the elderly, nudist acrobats. Who could forget.”

“That’s not where we met,” I said, grimacing. “I’ve been meaning to ask for so long if you remembered. I would have said at the party but Max was being…”

“…so very Max,” he said, laughing. “Yes. I understand. So where was it? How could I possibly forget?”