“Patrick put a picture in a box.”
“Good.”
Frank looked older than seventy in the duplex hall.
“I told her your names.”
“She already had our faces.”
“I am sorry.”
Christine had heard sorry on other Fridays, smaller ones.
“You should go back to the hotel,” she said. “You do not get to sit on my couch and be a man with two disasters like it is one job.”
He went back to the hotel.
Patrick, against Jenna’s advice and against Margaret’s silence, drove to Dayton two weeks later and sat in a parking lot outside a grocery store where Matthew had agreed, by text, to meet. Matthew looked like Frank around the eyes. Patrick looked like Frank around the mouth. They shook hands like men at a funeral.
“I blew up your birthday,” Matthew said.
“It was his birthday.”
“Still.”
They drank bad coffee in the car because neither wanted a booth.
Josh did not come. Josh was not ready.
Patrick said, “I don’t need a relationship. I needed you not to be a rumor I found in a garage.”
Matthew said, “We knew about you. Not your face. Your existence. He said you didn’t want to know us.”