Walsh leans forward, rests his elbows on his desk, looks at my son, waits, listens, and so we tell our story.

A work of pure fiction, our story goes like this: Nick had a drug problem. Sophomore year, he’d gotten hooked on pills acquired illegally on campus—benzos, stimulants, but mostly opioids—and Jonah, having grown wise, feared for his friend’s life and intervened. Jonah helped Nick kick, but in the end, no one could save Nick from his demons.

My fabricated detail: that I’d assumed Elizabeth had been looking for envelopes or stamps or tax returns when I opened the desk drawers in my home office last week to find that their contents had been shuffled. Never in a million years did it dawn on me to suspect Nick of ransacking my desk, searching for my NPI and DEA numbers—which I don’t keep at home, obviously, for the record.

Jonah roots my lie in yet another: just last week, Nick had been asking Jonah about my home office, and where I’d keep my prescriber numbers, or maybe samples of meds—which, again, for the record: not a chance—and Jonah, because he’s responsible, told Nick he’d crossed a red line, that he needed professional help, at which point Nick laughed and insisted he’d only been joking. How could we have known that Nick’s dark humor was malignant this time?

Jonah adds false finishing touches: that he was used to hearing about Nick’s temptations and impulses, that this was part of the process—a process that worked, until it didn’t, because Nick had stayed clean that whole time, or so Jonah had thought. Upon sharing this information with me last night, I tell Walsh, I made the connection with the desk drawer and Nick’s covert search for contraband. He hadn’t been joking after all. And one more thing: there’d been a complaint filed with our HOA about Nick’s use of marijuana in our guesthouse. If Ben Walters had consulted me immediately, there might have been time to intervene, but alas, the gateway drug strikes again. I hang my head.

And scene.

Zebadiah Walsh scrapes his pen against a pad of paper. He’s thinking about the autopsy, whatever it revealed, knowing that if traces of opiates had been found in Nick’s blood—say, the lingering effects of Vicodin popped like vitamins in college dorms—it would have registered as an unspecified opioid, no different from heroin or morphine. The same would apply to a hair sample, if toxicology ran one, which isn’t likely.

Noting two smiling children in a frame on his shelf, I ask Walsh, “Do you have kids?”

Without looking up to confirm that I’m referencing the photo behind him, he says, “Niece and nephew.”