“A piece of audio-video recording software that’s compatible with Skype. You think you could do that for me?”

“Give me your Skype name and password. I’ll take care of it right now.”

As the young man headed into the den armed with the information he needed, Gurney smiled at his eagerness to help, smiled also at the simple pleasure of his being in the house. It made him wonder, yet again, why their times together were so few and far between.

There was a period when he thought he knew the reason—a period peaking a couple of years earlier when Kyle was making an obscene amount of money on Wall Street, in a job he’d stepped into through a door opened by a college friend. Gurney was convinced that the yellow Porsche accompanying that job was proof positive that the money-mad genes of his real estate broker ex-wife, Kyle’s mother, had taken over. But now he suspected that this had been nothing more than a rationalization that absolved him of a deeper and less explainable failure to reach out to his son. He used to tell himself that it was because Kyle reminded him of his ex-wife in other unpleasant ways as well—certain gestures, intonations, facial expressions. But that too was a questionable excuse. There were many more differences than similarities between mother and son, and even if there weren’t, it would be petulant and unfair to equate one person with the other.

He would sometimes think that the real explanation was nothing more complicated than the defense of his own peculiar comfort zone. That comfort zone did not include other people. That was the point his college girlfriend, Geraldine, had hammered home the day she left him so many years ago. When he viewed the issue in that light, he saw his apparent avoidance of his son as just one more symptom of his innate introversion. Not such a big deal. Case closed. But as soon as he would settle on this, a tiny doubt would begin to nibble at the edge of his certainty. Did simple introversion fully explain how little he saw of Kyle? And the nibble would grow into a gnawing question: Did the presence of one son inevitably remind him that he’d once had two sons and would still have two sons if only …

Kyle reappeared at the kitchen door. “You’re all set up. I left the screen open for you. It’s totally simple.”

“Oh. Great. Thank you.”

Kyle was watching him with a curious smile.

It reminded Gurney of a look he sometimes saw on Madeleine’s face. “What are you thinking?”