For a while we said nothing. “Can I ask you a question?” I said, and after a second or two, he nodded again. I didn’t even know what I was going to say until I was saying it, and as I was saying it, I didn’t know where it had come from, other than I suppose it was something I had always known and had never wanted to ask, because I dreaded his answer: I knew what it would be, and I didn’t want to hear it. “Were you sexually abused as a child?”

I could sense, rather than see, him stiffen, and under my hand, I could feel him shudder. He still hadn’t looked at me, and now he rolled to his left side, moving his bandaged arm to the pillow next to him. “Jesus, Harold,” he said, finally.

I withdrew my hand. “How old were you when it happened?” I asked.

There was a pause, and then he pushed his face into the pillow. “Harold,” he said, “I’m really tired. I need to sleep.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, which jumped, but I held on. Beneath my palm I could feel his muscles tense, could feel that shiver running through him. “It’s okay,” I told him. “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of,” I said. “It’s not your fault, Jude, do you understand me?” But he was pretending to be asleep, though I could still feel that vibration, everything in his body alert and alarmed.

I sat there for a while longer, watching him hold himself rigid. Finally I left, closing the door behind me.

I stayed for the rest of the week. You called him that night, and I answered his phone and lied to you, said something useless about an accident, heard the worry in your voice and wanted so badly to tell you the truth. The next day, you called again and I listened outside his door as he lied to you as well: “A car accident. No. No, not serious. What? I was up at Richard’s house for the weekend. I nodded off and hit a tree. I don’t know; I was tired—I’ve been working a lot. No, a rental. Because mine’s in the shop. It’s not a big deal. No, I’m going to be fine. No, you know Harold—he’s just overreacting. I promise. I swear. No, he’s in Rome until the end of next month. Willem: I promise. It’s fine! Okay. I know. Okay. I promise; I will. You too. Bye.”

Mostly, he was meek, tractable. He ate his soup every morning, he took his pills. They made him logy. Every morning he was in his study, working, but by eleven he was on the couch, sleeping. He slept through lunch, and all afternoon, and I only woke him for dinner. You called him every night. Julia called him, too: I always tried to eavesdrop, but couldn’t hear much of their conversations, only that he didn’t say much, which meant Julia must have been saying a great deal. Malcolm came over several times, and the Henry Youngs and Elijah and Rhodes visited as well. JB sent over a drawing of an iris; I had never known him to draw flowers before. He fought me, as Andy had predicted, on the dressings on his legs and back, which he wouldn’t, no matter how I pleaded with and shouted at him, let me see. He let Andy, and I heard Andy say to him, “You’re going to need to come uptown every other day and let me change these. I mean it.”

“Fine,” he snapped.

Lucien came to see him, but he was asleep in his study. “Don’t wake him,” he said, and then, peeking in at him, “Jesus.” We talked for a bit, and he told me about how admired he was at the firm, which is something you never get tired of hearing about your child, whether he is four and in preschool and excels with clay, or is forty and in a white-shoe firm and excels in the protection of corporate criminals. “I’d say you must be proud of him, but I think I know your politics too well for that.” He grinned. He liked Jude quite a bit, I could tell, and I found myself feeling slightly jealous, and then stingy for feeling jealous at all.

“No,” I said. “I am proud of him.” I felt bad then, for my years of scolding him about Rosen Pritchard, the one place where he felt safe, the one place he felt truly weightless, the one place where his fears and insecurities banished themselves.

By the following Monday, the day before I left, he looked better: his cheeks were the color of mustard, but the swelling had subsided, and you could see the bones of his face again. It seemed to hurt him a little less to breathe, a little less to speak, and his voice was less breathy, more like itself. Andy had let him halve his morning pain dosage, and he was more alert, though not exactly livelier. We played a game of chess, which he won.

“I’ll be back on Thursday evening,” I told him over dinner. I only had classes on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays that semester.

“No,” he said, “you don’t have to. Thank you, Harold, but really—I’ll be fine.”

“I already bought the ticket,” I said. “And anyway, Jude—you don’t always have to say no, you know. Remember? Acceptance?” He didn’t say anything else.

So what else can I tell you? He went back to work that Wednesday, despite Andy’s suggestion he stay home through the end of the week. And despite his threats, Andy came over every night to change his dressings and inspect his legs. Julia returned, and every weekend in October, she or I would go to New York and stay with him at Greene Street. Malcolm stayed with him during the week. He didn’t like it, I could tell, but we decided we didn’t care what he liked, not in this matter.

He got better. His legs didn’t get infected. Neither did his back. He was lucky, Andy kept saying. He regained the weight he had lost. By the time you came home, in early November, he was almost healed. By Thanksgiving, which we had that year at the apartment in New York so he wouldn’t have to travel, his cast had been removed and he was walking again. I watched him closely over dinner, watched him talking with Laurence and laughing with one of Laurence’s daughters, but couldn’t stop thinking of him that night, his face when Caleb grabbed his wrist, his expression of pain and shame and fear. I thought of the day I had learned he was using a wheelchair at all: it was shortly after I had found the bag in Truro and was in the city for a conference, and he had come into the restaurant in his chair, and I had been shocked. “Why did you never tell me?” I asked, and he had pretended to be surprised, acted like he thought he had. “No,” I said, “you hadn’t,” and finally he had told me that he hadn’t wanted me to see him that way, as someone weak and helpless. “I would never think of you that way,” I’d told him, and although I didn’t think I did, it did change how I thought of him; it made me remember that what I knew of him was just a tiny fraction of who he was.

It sometimes seemed as if that week had been a haunting, one that only Andy and I had witnessed. In the months that followed, someone would occasionally joke about it: his poor driving, his Wimbledon ambitions, and he would laugh back, make some self-deprecating comment. He could never look at me in those moments; I was a reminder of what had really happened, a reminder of what he saw as his degradation.

But later, I would recognize how that incident had taken something large from him, how it had changed him: into someone else, or maybe into someone he had once been. I would see the months before Caleb as a period in which he was healthier than he’d been: he had allowed me to hug him when I saw him, and when I touched him—putting an arm around him as I passed him in the kitchen—he would let me; his hand would go on chopping the carrots before him in the same steady rhythm. It had taken twenty years for that to happen. But after Caleb, he regressed. At Thanksgiving, I had gone toward him to embrace him, but he had quickly stepped to the left—just a bit, just enough so that my arms closed around air, and there had been a second in which we looked at each other, and I knew that whatever I had been allowed just a few months ago I would be no longer: I knew I would have to start all over. I knew that he had decided that Caleb was right, that he was disgusting, that he had, somehow, deserved what had happened to him. And that was the worst thing, the most reprehensible thing. He had decided to believe Caleb, to believe him over us, because Caleb confirmed what he had always thought and always been taught, and it is always easier to believe what you already think than to try to change your mind.