She got up to go to the wine bottles but stopped midway. “Remember the time I interviewed the parents of that Tenleytown triple murder for you?”

She had. She was younger, and she’d rescued him. Saved him from the misery of making how-do-you-feel calls. She’d sensed he couldn’t face them. He’d forgotten that. He’d been too busy fretting ever since she’d hugged him and given him her number. And, like a freshman in love, he’d put off calling her; it was as if taking up her invitation might expose how little she’d meant it.

“Red or white?”

“Red.”

She put a finger on one label, then another. Stoney’s—not the Stoney’s of her Jonathan Strasser debacle, but from her earliest days—came back to her: the after-work drinks, bartenders from earlier closers, pushed-together tables of firemen, a night girl or three breaking for the cheeseburgers, the majority, even the hookers and excepting the water throwers, looking like mid-managing government types with fringe habits and family issues. There was a table of Newport-chaining cops, brothers in plainclothes. She handed Stanley his glass.

“To kin,” she said, raising her own.

“What were you thinking of just now?”

“Oh, Stoney’s. In the old days.”

“It’s closing, you know.”

“No.”

“Yes. They got an offer on the building—it used to be the worst part of town; now, with the Convention Center, it’s all changing.”

“That makes me so sad. Sadder than I thought I could feel—about Stoney’s.”

“So much went on there. So much.”

“You still have those oak boxes?” She remembered his filing system.

He was embarrassed, but only some. “Yes I do. Yes.”

“They were amazing. What Don wouldn’t give to get his hands on those. ’Course, he’d never admit that.”

“He knows this city better than I do.”

“You don’t believe that for a second.”

He suppressed a smile and then laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t.”

“He’s always wondered about you.”

“We’re talking about your husband, Don Grady?” He was teasing, but also wanting, not a little desperately, to hear more.

“We all wondered about you,” she said. “Talked about you at Stoney’s. Is he straight? Thai royalty? Senator’s love child? For five minutes someone had the idea Nixon sent you to spy on Don. But they couldn’t tally that with your crying jags. Yet you weren’t entirely soft. When Janet Cooke fabricated the eight-year-old heroin addict, you didn’t believe her. Don did. But you didn’t. It ruined him, you know. For running the place. That’s why he had to write these … these books.”