“I’m okay,” I said, but as we sat down with our coffee a few minutes later it was clear Allen wasn’t. “Lee would say I wasn’t aware traffic could pass in two different directions at once.”

Allen did not smile. I put my hand over his.

“Hey, it wasn’t as close as it looked.”

“It was close enough,” Allen said. He shut his eyes for a few moments. When he opened them they looked sad, resigned.

I lifted my coffee cup and drank. Allen’s cup remained untouched.

“Hey,” I said, smiling but also a little exasperated. “That’s all there is to it. I promise I have no Sexton or Plath volumes on my bedside table. I don’t listen to Joni Mitchell CDs with my hands full of sleeping pills. I was just coming to get you and was careless.”

Allen stared at the table. His free hand lifted the coffee cup from the table as though checking its weight, then placed the cup back without raising it to his lips. He cleared his throat.

“Claire was coming to get me at Dulles when she and Miranda died. The flight had been eighteen hours, and I was tired and irritable. I waited thirty minutes and then called the house, figuring she’d forgotten. The answering machine picked up. I called again fifteen minutes later and left a message this time. I told Claire I was getting a cab. I also told her that if she weren’t so damn self-involved she might remember when her husband who’d been gone five weeks was coming home.”

I held my hand open between us as if to deflect his words.

“You don’t have to tell me this,” I said.

“I know,” Allen said, “but I think it’s better if I do.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I got my taxi and we headed toward Georgetown. It was raining hard so the ride took longer than usual. On the other side of the parkway it was worse. There’d been a wreck, and traffic was backed up a mile. I remember thinking how glad I was that the wreck was in the southbound lanes. When I got to the apartment, two messages were blinking on the answering machine. The first was mine. The second was the hospital, telling me to call immediately.”

“You can’t feel bad about things you didn’t know,” I said. My words sounded so facile I didn’t say anything else. For a few moments neither of us spoke.

“Well,” Allen finally said. “We better get back to work.”

“I’m glad you told me,” I said. “I want to know these things.”

Allen lifted the coffee to his mouth. It had sat long enough that he could drink deeply. He did not put the cup down until it was empty.

“Let’s go,” he said.

As we stepped off the curb I held on to his arm.