“I met my wife at a party, in the center of a crowd of people. That’s the way she’s always been. As for me, my parents always had people in, neighbors, friends, my father’s friends on the force. What was outside the family came in, and we went out. It was all of a piece. Do you understand? I played stickball in the schoolyard down the block every afternoon for five years, until I outgrew it. The neighborhood mattered almost as much as the family.”

The waiter was coming. She seemed to like what Leland had said. There had been no evasion and he did not think she could help seeing that he had tried to win her trust. The waiter put down the food, repeating the order as Leland had given it to him.

“Anything else, sir?”

“Not right now.”

She watched the waiter go. “I like the way you talk to him.”

Leland smiled. “I don’t know why.”

“You never look at him.”

“I said I didn’t like his face.”

She blushed a little. “That’s not it. You expect him to hop to his job and get away from here.”

“Don’t you?”

“Yes, but—I don’t know.”

“Your husband doesn’t do it that way,” he said.

“Murray goes over everything twice. He doesn’t take restaurants in his stride.”

“What about MacIver?”

“It’s hard to remember. You’re all business—you want me to stay on the job.” She smiled. “We rarely ate out and when we did, we didn’t go to places where you could expect good service.

“I almost never met him,” she said after a moment. “When I was a junior at Jefferson my father had a very severe heart attack. I wanted to quit school and go to work, but they wouldn’t let me. My parents worked together in a grocery they owned and their one ambition was to get me through college.

“Colin was the one in the hurry when we were going out. Don’t misunderstand, I’d never felt anything as intense before. I didn’t need much of a push on my level. My father was dying, and my mother—it’s hard to believe if you haven’t seen it—didn’t care about living anymore. My parents had lived the same way for thirty years and suddenly it was over. All of us knew it.”