Kris Ann was quiet that night, the deep and inward silence of someone brooding on a hard decision. She glanced at me occasionally, distant and thoughtful. I tried reading until she picked up her sketches of the children she taught, done to distract her since Henry’s death. She began drawing with deft, short strokes, lips parted as they were when sleeping, so that she looked always about to speak, or even smile. I watched her, remembering how I’d watched her seven years before, memorizing her movements and expressions so that I could hold them in my mind like photographs. She had known that, and it had quickened her smile and the things she did in my apartment. She had cooked and I cleaned and she spent her spare time painting and reading the books I liked then, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and essays by Camus, talking about them later. “It’s strange,” she once said of, Camus. “I don’t think he’s sure why he hopes for so much, or even if he should. But he does.” I had smiled then. We were going to Washington.…

The next morning I went to Maddox Coal and Steel.

Mooring’s office was at the end of a carpeted hallway lined by pictures of foundries, open hearths, and blast furnaces. A short-haired woman in her forties sat next to his closed door. “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“No. But tell him Adam Shaw is here. I think he’ll see me.”

She frowned, pressed the intercom button, and said, “There’s a Mr. Shaw outside.” Her frown deepened and she hung up looking betrayed. “Go on in,” she said.

Mooring sat at his desk. His drapes were drawn, his office spare, neat, and dark. “What is it?” he asked.

“Our deal is finished.”

His lids dropped. “You wouldn’t be here,” he finally said, “if you didn’t want something.”

“I’ve got two questions. I want the answers.”

“And if I won’t give them?”

“Then I’ll help the newspapers grub through your affair with Lydia Cantwell until you wish it had never happened.”

He looked up at me, curious and almost detached. “What’s in that for you?”

“The pleasure of it.”

His eyes flickered. “That’s unnatural.”

“It’s natural as breathing. Push too many people too far and one of them is going to watch you, and wait. It’s my turn.”

He folded his hands on the desk in front of him, appraising me. “All right,” he said at length. “I’ll listen to your questions.”

I sat, leaning forward over his desk to ask quietly, “Whose son is Jason Cantwell?”

Mooring looked away. Finally, he said, “I’ve never known.”

“That’s hard to believe.”