Do you call this parked?” Jack questioned, standing on the curb with his hands on his hips and gazing at the more than two feet that separated James’s Range Rover from where he was standing.

“It was the best I could do,” James said. “Don’t give me a hard time! Just get in. I assure you I can get you home safely.”

Both men climbed into the SUV’s front seat. Jack made a point of fastening his seat belt. If James’s park job was as good as he could do, Jack was mildly concerned. “You haven’t had too much wine, have you?”

“As wired as I am, I don’t feel like I’ve had any.”

“I could drive,” Jack offered. “I had very little.”

“I’m fine,” James said as he maneuvered out of the tight space.

They drove in silence through the West Village, each digesting the dinner party’s edgy conversation.

“Shawn is impossible,” James said suddenly, while they waited for a traffic light before getting onto the West Side Highway. “Of course, he’s always been impossible.”

“He’s always been his own person,” Jack said.

James glanced in Jack’s direction, catching the man’s strong profile against the streetlights. “That’s rather limp support.”

Jack looked over at James, and their eyes caught for a moment before the light changed, and James had to drive ahead. “I’m sorry,” Jack said. “And I probably shouldn’t say anything at all for fear of making things worse for you. I can certainly tell how passionately you feel, but from my humble perspective, he does seem to have a point.”

“You’re on his side?” James demanded, with a mixture of surprise and dismay.

“No, I’m not on anyone’s side,” Jack said. “But last time he invited me to dinner, which I told you about, and we were alone, washing the dishes, we did speak briefly about you and your impressive successes with the Church hierarchy. That stimulated him to tell me a few things that I’d never known. By the time we all came in contact, in college, he was already a lapsed Catholic, but I had never known why.”

James cast another quick glance in Jack’s direction before returning his attention to the road. “Don’t tell me! He wasn’t molested himself, was he?”

“No, nothing as dramatic as that, but close.”

“This is new material,” James said. “What do you mean ‘close’?”

“Because I had no experience with religion growing up in an atheist household, I feel at a disadvantage telling his story, but I’ll give it a go. Apparently, as a very young teenager, he loved the Church, as did both his parents.”

“I’m aware of that,” James said.

“Then you know he and his parents were very active in their parish.”

“I’m aware of that as well.”