I follow the Charles River as it bends and snakes, curving like the corridors in my building, taking me where I’ve begun and ended, where I’ve been and will go, past the DeWolfe Boathouse again, past the Morse School playground again, heading in the direction of Howard Roth’s neighborhood again, on my way to Fayth House. The dark blue Ford is on my bumper, and I see the face with dark glasses in my rearview mirror.

Watching me, daring me. Brazenly following me.

“Food and wine,” I told Benton over the phone a little while ago, when I didn’t know this would happen, and I’m shocked.

I’m incensed and disbelieving, and at the same time not sure why I’m surprised.

“We will eat together, be together, all of us,” I said, alone and hungry and beginning to feel worn down by it all, a single question burning on the dark horizon of my dark thoughts.

I watch the car behind me, my heart turning hard like something vital dying and petrifying into my own bone bed of emotion. Now you’ve gone too far, I think. You’ve really gone too far, and I imagine dinner with Lucy, Benton, Marino. I’m hungry and angry and want to be with people I care about, and I’ve had enough, because it’s too much now. I turn right on River Street, and Douglas Burke turns, too, her dark glasses staring.

I pull into the parking lot of the Rite Aid at the intersection of Blackstone and River Streets, letting her know I’m aware that she’s been on my tail for the past ten minutes and I’m not going to be harassed by her and I’m not afraid of her, either. I roll down the window of my SUV, and we are driver’s door to driver’s door like two cops, like comrades, which we’re certainly not.

We’re enemies, and she’s openly letting me know it.

“What is it, Douglas?” I’ve never been able to call her Doug or Dougie.

It’s all I can do to call her anything.

“I wasn’t going to say this in front of them.” Her glasses are dark green or black, and the sun is low, the old low buildings of Cambridge casting long shadows, a low late-afternoon well on its way to the lowest time of the year around here, a New England brutal winter.

“Out of professional respect, I didn’t bring it up with them in the room,” she says.

“In front of them?” I ask, and she has no professional respect for anyone, least of all for me.

Her dark glasses stare.

“You mean in front of Benton,” I assume.

“I know about your niece.” She pushes those words out like animals shoved, herded, moved with aggression.

I don’t answer her.