“That a good thing, Mr. Giddreaux?” Franklin Grouse said.

Isaiah tilted his hand from left-to-right, left-to-right. “It’s what man makes of it.”

“White man or black man?” Luther asked, and the table broke out laughing.

The happier and more comfortable he became, the sadder he felt. This could be his life—should be his life—with Lila, right now, not as a guest at the table but as the head of it and maybe some of those children would have been his, too. He caught Mrs. Giddreaux smiling at him, and when he met her smile with his own, she gave him a wink, and he could see her soul again, the supple grace of it, and it was lit with blue light.

At the end of the evening, after most of the guests had left and Isaiah and Yvette were taking their brandy with the Parthans, two old friends since his days at Morehouse and hers at Atlanta Baptist, Luther excused himself and went up to the roof with his own glass of brandy and let himself out onto the widow’s walk. The snow had stopped falling, but all the roofs were thick with it. Horns bayed from the harbor and the lights of the city spread a yellow band across the lowest reaches of the sky. He closed his eyes and sucked in the smell of the night and the snow and cold, the smoke and soot and brick dust. He felt as if he were snorting the sky right off the outermost curve of the earth. He kept his eyes shut tight and blocked out the death of Jessie and the stone-ache in his heart that had only one name: Lila. He asked only for this moment, this air that he held in his lungs, that filled his body and swelled in his head.

But it didn’t work—Jessie came crashing through, turning to Luther to say, “Kinda fun, huh?” and less than a second later pieces of his head went popping off and he fell to the floor. The Deacon, too, the Deacon of all people, surfaced in the wave that followed Jessie, and Luther saw him clutching at him, heard him saying, “Make this right,” and his eyes bulged with the universal plea not to be extinguished, not today, as Luther shoved the gun under his chin, and those bulging eyes said I’m not ready to go. Wait.

But Luther hadn’t waited. And now the Deacon was somewhere with Jessie and Luther was up here, aboveground. It took only a second for another to arrive on the same path as yours and change your life to a point it couldn’t change back. One second.

“Why won’t you write me, woman?” Luther whispered it to the starless sky. “You carrying my child, and I don’t want him growing up without me. Don’t want him knowing that feeling. No, no, girl,” he whispered, “there’s only you. Only you.”

He lifted his brandy off the brick ledge and took a drink that singed his throat and warmed his chest and widened his eyes.