“Everything about your career. Your collective career. She wrote as much of the books as you did. More, in some cases! The Beauty’s Beast. Red as Rubies. Jury of Peers.”

“Ah,” said Leonard. He sat back in the desk chair and regarded Anthony.

“Well?” said Anthony. “Is it true?”

Leonard said, “So, with this little tidbit, you think you know everything. You think you know the whole story.”

“I think I know most of it,” Anthony said. He felt like they should be drinking something more manly—bourbon, scotch—but the wine went down easy and he began to feel more relaxed.

“I bet you don’t,” said Leonard. “So why don’t I tell you when it started?”

“Okay,” said Anthony. He hated how compliant he sounded.

“I was sick with the flu,” said Leonard. “I was so sick, for almost a month. I don’t know if you remember that. You were in middle school. My last two books had done extremely well.”

“I don’t,” said Anthony evenly. He did, but he wanted to hear his father tell it. The year of the flu, seventh grade. Some particularly virulent strain had appeared, and half the school was out for days at a time. Then his father caught it. Anthony and Dorothy somehow escaped. He remembered his mother disappearing constantly into the master bedroom. Tending to the sick, Anthony had thought at the time.

“Sick or not, the deadline didn’t go anywhere. There was no leeway. You wouldn’t understand, you haven’t been doing it like I have. You’re not the same kind of writer. One novel to your name.”

“Two,” said Anthony. “And the short stories.”

Leonard raised an eyebrow. “Not quite two, is it? And I don’t count the short stories. Short stories don’t sell.”

“Well, I understand the concept of a deadline,” said Anthony evenly. He drank more wine.

“The pressure to produce, to keep producing, on the schedule the publisher had set up. It was enormous. But to stop, when I was just getting that momentum—that simply wasn’t an option. I never would have become what I became if I’d stopped. So I was trying to work on the book when I was quite ill, and I couldn’t keep the thoughts straight in my head. They kept—” He made a whirling motion with his hand. “They kept moving around. Every morning while you were at school your mother would come in with a pad of paper and take notes for me. My hands were too shaky to write. I’d say the lines of dialogue, and she’d write them down, and every now and then she’d make a suggestion. What if the killer said this instead of that? What if the child appeared in the scene in the restaurant, or the argument took place on the boat? And so on. On we went like that, for days and days and days, and when I was better, and I was back in my study, I realized how helpful she’d been to me. I started calling her in when I had a question, a doubt. Her suggestions became more and more integral to the book. That book did better than any of them, and when it was time to start the next book, it just seemed natural that we would work on it together. So we did.” He looked down at his hands, then took a long pull of the Cabernet. “And we’ve simply never stopped.”