“So what did he look like?”

I tried to remember. “Grumpy,” I said. “He wasn’t pleased about letting us in. It was a favour to Trevor.”

“Physically, though,” said Jessica.

I thought about it. I tried to conjure up an image of Finny the man, the physical specimen. I remembered forearms, bristling with dark hair, holding the door open for us. He’d addressed Trevor briskly, in monosyllables, but not Kelli and me. I remembered looking past him, trying to see into the impressive foyer. There’d been no time for introductions, because he had to get back to work.

I shrugged. “Just kind of . . . medium build, I guess. A little stocky, maybe.”

Jessica turned back to the screen and resumed pecking. I looked around. We were at a coffeeshop on Argyle, surrounded by people doing more or less the exact same thing Jessica was on their various devices. I was starting to feel impatient. I wanted her to put away the tablet and look at me, to get on with the post-slap conversation, to make sure she and I were ok. To apologize as many more times as might be necessary and have her reassure me that all was forgiven and our friendship was intact. It felt like maybe all the intensive googling was Jessica’s way of circumnavigating that. Maybe she was less willing to forgive and forget than I’d been counting on.

“Why do you want to see him?” I asked finally.

“This guy,” said Jessica, turning the tablet toward me. I squinted at the picture on the screen. It was a group photo, taken outdoors, of what looked to be a softball team. The photo was featured on the website for a facility called Arborville Advanced Care — a nursing home, apparently. The team was co-ed, of all ages and shapes — staff members, clearly. They called themselves, the caption informed me, the Arborville Anteaters, which I thought was rather playful. The photo, the caption also mentioned, was three years old.

Below the caption, the names of the teammates were listed, and I saw from a glance that one of those names was Stephen Finn.

Jessica tapped a fingernail against the screen, at a spot where a man was standing in the front, at the very end of the row. He was posed in a way that stood out from all the other members of his team, facing forward, toward the camera, instead of inward as everyone else had clearly been instructed to do. Everyone else had also been instructed to “squeeze in,” it looked to me, their bodies packed cozily together, and Stephen Finn was the only one who had refused. As a result, he stood distinctly apart from his teammates, as if he’d arrived late, or had been standing there minding his own business when a softball team decided to congregate for a photo and he just happened to be caught in the frame. His nonconforming attitude toward the camera struck me as almost belligerent. And it was the belligerence I recognized before anything else.