Two months earlier, he would have welcomed these words as an indication of a healthy distance between them. But now they stung. “Since when aren’t you my business?”

“You give up a certain number of rights when you make a unilateral decision to move away for a handful of months, and, as you’re walking out the door, as much as tell a friend you’re embarrassed by our commitment to each other. And then you come back for a visit, still not ready to talk, just hump away for twenty-four hours, like you’ve hired me and want to get your money’s worth.”

“You didn’t seem to mind about the humping part. Not, I gather, that you’re in desperate need.”

There was a conversation stopper, at least for a few minutes. The problem with silence, so welcome at some moments, was that it could mean anything: “How dare you suggest such a thing” or “How did you find out?”

Finally, Russell said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me, Russell. Why should I have to do all the work in this relationship?”

Thinking back on it as he walked away from Peter’s newly minted neighborhood, Desmond saw that the conversation had, at that point, hit a patch of black ice, one of those invisible hazards of driving in unpredictable climates, and gone into a swerve. The only way to wrest control of the vehicle, he’d been taught, is to steer into the swerve—face it head-on—which unfortunately happens to be completely counterintuitive. Rather than discussing the book and the eyeglasses and his own suspicions and calmly pumping the brakes, he followed his heart and swung the wheel back and forth wildly, as if he were driving a bumper car. In the volley of indirect insults and evasions that followed, they’d narrowly missed hitting a tree, but had ended up stuck in a snowbank on the side of the road, Russell acting as if Desmond had offended him, Desmond refusing to beg for more information.