“They keep asking me at the office why I don’t answer the phone. It looks like I don’t care, like I can’t be bothered when they need me.”

“You could give them my number. It’s fine with me.” I stroked his back.

“It’s not fine with me. I can’t be driving down from Malibu while we’re covering the Emmett Till case. It’s not right. They need me at the paper.” He stood, reached for his pants, and slid them on. “I’m going back to Naomi for a while. It’s not personal, baby, but it’s not right either. I need to be where I’m needed. You understand, don’t you?”

I wanted to protest, to fling myself across the door and beg him to stay, but I watched him go and I did not resist. At least I’d learned that much, hadn’t I? Max and Simon and Nelson and Jerrold had all learned the hard way that the unstable alliance of passion and principle, of responsibility and integrity, would inevitably exact costs. Someone like Terrence Dexter, well, he had known that for generations. Someone like me? My lessons lay ahead.

•   •   •

Ten days passed (and I was counting). I didn’t see Terrence, but we talked on the phone often. The crisis created by the death of Emmett Till in faraway Mississippi kept him working nonstop at the paper and with the NAACP.

On the eleventh day Irene breezed into Clara Bow Drive, nodded to Thelma, and called out that I must cancel all my appointments this afternoon and go with her to UCLA Medical Center.

I panicked. “Is Leon sick?”

“It’s Clarence. Yesterday they found him writhing in pain on the floor, and they took him to the hospital. No one even knew he was sick again.”

“Again?”

“He was off work for about three months a few years ago. You must have been in Paris. A bad scare, cancer, but he’s fine now. Well, not fine right now. Obviously. He had some sort of obstruction of the bowel and they operated yesterday.”

“And is he all right?”

“He’s recovering. Leon insists we both go see him on behalf of the family.”

“Leon wants me to go too?” I asked, heartened at the request.

“Well, you’re family, aren’t you?”

“Leon hasn’t exactly embraced me of late.”

“And whose fault is that?” she snapped.

I got up and closed the door to my office. I had never told Thelma that Irene had guessed about Max. “Why can’t Leon go?”

“Because he’s Leon Greene! He can’t leave the studio to go sit at the bedside of some old family retainer.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“What?” Irene looked genuinely puzzled.

“To speak of Clarence like he’s a pet or something. Summit Drive would fall apart without him. What does it matter if he’s black or white?”