“I had a roommate at Columbia,” Berger said, fastening her coat. “We shared this slum of an apartment. I didn’t have money, wasn’t born with it, married into it, and you know all that. During law school we lived in this most God-awful place in Morningside Heights, it’s a wonder both of us weren’t murdered in our sleep.”

She tucked her hands into her pockets while Lucy’s eyes held hers, both of them leaning their shoulders against the door.

“We were extremely close,” Berger added.

“You don’t owe me any explanations,” Lucy said. “I completely respect who you are and why you live the way you do.”

“You don’t know enough to respect anything, actually. And I’m going to give you an explanation, not because I owe it but because I want to. She had something wrong with her, my roommate. I won’t say her name. A mood disorder, which I had no understanding of at the time, and when she got ugly and angry I thought she meant it. I fought with her when I shouldn’t have, because that made matters only worse, unbelievably worse. One Saturday night, a neighbor called the police. I’m surprised you didn’t dig that up somewhere. Nothing was done about it, but it was rather unpleasant, and both of us were drunk and looked like train wrecks. If I ever run for office, you can imagine, if there are stories like that.”

“Why would there be?” Lucy asked. “Unless you plan on getting in fights when you’re drunk and looking like a train wreck.”

“There was never a threat of that with Greg, you see. I don’t think we ever yelled at each other. Certainly never threw anything. We coexisted without rancor or much of anything. A relatively pleasant detente, much of the time.”

“What happened to your roommate?”

“I suppose it depends on how you measure success,” Berger said. “But nothing good, in my opinion. It will only get worse for her because she lives a lie, meaning she doesn’t live at all, and life is very unforgiving if you don’t live it, especially as you get older. I’ve never lived a lie. You may think so, but I haven’t. I’ve simply had to figure things out as I’ve gone along, and I’ve respected decisions I’ve made, right or wrong, no matter how hard that’s been. Many things remain irrelevant as long as they remain theoretical.”

“Meaning there wasn’t someone and hasn’t been when there shouldn’t have been,” Lucy said.

“I’m no Sunday-school teacher. Far from it,” Berger said. “But my life is nobody’s business, and it’s mine to mess up, and I don’t intend to mess it up. I won’t let you mess it up, nor do I intend to mess up yours.”

“Do you always start with disclaimers?”