Boone said he needed coffee and why didn’t I come with him? I still hadn’t heard from Aaron, maybe that was why I said I would. Also, he’d dressed down today, in jeans and a gray T-shirt underneath his usual button-down. He looked more like my slightly inappropriate New York boyfriend than my dad. Me, I could have used a cleaner shirt, as had been pointed out to me.

We wound up at a strip mall coffee shop, sitting across from each other at a table in front of the window. He’d paid for my coffee and I’d let him, because that felt harmless enough. I wasn’t trying to flirt with him; in fact, I kept trying not to. I kept looking for Viridian in him, and I both did and did not find her, like a mirror with a flaw. It’s not like we were anything except an odd couple. But here we were again, face to face.

He said, “This blood pressure problem? It may explain some things.”

“What things,” I said, wishing I wasn’t going to find out.

“You have to keep this confidential,” he said, which annoyed me, because I didn’t want to share secrets with him. I shrugged, meaning, Sure.

“Ed’s been worried about my mother. Even before this. About her finances.”

I didn’t want to let on that I knew anything about it, so I nodded and looked noncommittal.

“She has an investment account. Ed helped her set it up. It’s meant to provide for her, but she’s been spending it down with nothing coming in.”

“She has her workshops.” Or as Oscar called them, hen parties. “People pay to study with her.”

“They don’t pay very much. Ed’s tried to talk to her. Get her to see a financial planner. But you can’t get her to care about money. He tried, then I tried. She blew me off. Why should she listen to me, anyway?”

I watched his fingers tap, tap, tapping against the rim of his coffee cup, a nervous circuit. How much was owed to a child left behind? More than could ever be repaid.

He went on. “I guess it’s supposed to be this great yoga-Zen detachment, you know, not letting yourself care about material things. But now I’m wondering if it isn’t some kind of dementia. Blood flow to the brain getting squeezed. Something that’s been creeping up on her.”

I might have told him he was dead wrong, except for what I’d just witnessed in her hospital room. I said, “She writes poetry. You can’t do that if you’re losing your mind.” Or could you? I wanted to deny it and defend her. But my heart was sinking.

“Yeah. Different parts of the brain, maybe. The way musicians with Alzheimer’s can still remember songs.”

“It’s not the same.”