Finally—finally! after an eternity!—Leonard put the story on the desk and tapped the edges of each page into place. He blinked down at the pages for a long moment before he spoke, and Anthony wondered if a fairly fit twenty-year-old could possibly suffer a heart attack, because he felt something in his chest squeezing and squeezing. (There was heart disease in his father’s family, it wasn’t out of the question!)

“You might be better at this writing thing than I am,” said Leonard Puckett. He was squinting, first at the pages, and then up at Anthony, and he wore an expression that combined consternation and pride, perhaps with a small dose of disbelief mixed in. There had been an early snow that year, and the spot in the garden where the roses would bloom come summer was overlaid in a white that was scarcely visible in the diminishing light. Anthony could feel the scotch building a fire in his chest. “There’s just so much in here—” Leonard’s voice broke off and he took a long sip of his own scotch. “You might be a prodigy.” He said it softly, as though he couldn’t quite take it in himself. “Look, we’ll work on this together . . . We’ll polish it here and there, and then, well.”

“Then what?” asked Anthony. He’d meant to breathe the words but instead, because of the scotch, he’d ended up sort of yelling them. Together? He couldn’t remember a moment when his father had suggested that they do something together.

“Then you really should send it out,” said Leonard. “You must.”

With those words, whether he meant to or not, he laid the mantle upon Anthony’s shoulders.

Granta accepted the story, and it happened that a literary agent named Huxley Wilder read it and took a particular liking to it, calling the magazine, the way the agents do, to secure Anthony’s contact info.

The first thing that happened after Anthony’s crime was revealed was that Anthony stopped running. He stopped eating fruit; he stopped eating vegetables. He developed a soft pudding of a stomach. At night he couldn’t sleep; he prowled the house like a cat burglar. I’m sorry, he whispered, over Max’s sleeping figure. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry. He watched all five seasons of Homeland, even the third season, which most people agreed was terrible. (Anthony thought it had its good moments and had been too harshly judged.) When Cassie was in her studio working and Max was at preschool, he slept for hours on end, burrowing deep into his bed as though the covers were a rabbit warren and he an eastern cottontail. I’m sorry, he said, when he woke up, to Cassie, to Max. I’m sorry I slept so long. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Sometimes he woke in the night, sweating, to find Cassie’s place in the bed empty. She was working, she said, when he inquired in the morning. And yet she was always freshly showered, smelling like a summer garden. She was with Max, or she was driving back and forth between home and the art gallery in the South End, where she was helping Glen Manning “mount a show.”