“Who are you?” Lucien asks.

“Jude,” he says.

“Now, remind me,” Lucien says, pleasantly, as if they’re meeting at a cocktail party, “how do I know you?”

“You were my mentor,” he tells him.

“Ah,” says Lucien. And then there is a silence.

In the first weeks, he tried to make Lucien remember his own life: he talked about Rosen Pritchard, and about people they knew, and cases they used to argue about. But then he realized that the expression he had mistaken—in his own stupid hopefulness—for thoughtfulness was in reality fear. And so now he discusses nothing from the past, or nothing from their past together, at least. He lets Lucien direct the conversation, and although he doesn’t understand the references Lucien makes, he smiles and tries to pretend he does.

“Who are you?” Lucien asks.

“Jude,” he says.

“Now, tell me, how do I know you?”

“You were my mentor.”

“Oh, at Groton!”

“Yes,” he says, trying to smile back. “At Groton.”

Sometimes, though, Lucien looks at him. “Mentor?” he says. “I’m too young to be your mentor!” Or sometimes he doesn’t ask at all, simply begins a conversation in its middle, and he has to wait until he has enough clues and can determine what role he has been assigned—one of his daughters’ long-ago boyfriends, or a college classmate, or a friend at the country club—before he can respond appropriately.

In these hours he learns more about Lucien’s earlier life than Lucien had ever revealed to him before. Although Lucien is no longer Lucien, at least not the Lucien he knew. This Lucien is vague and featureless; he is as smooth and cornerless as an egg. Even his voice, that droll croaking roll with which Lucien used to deliver his sentences, each one a statement, the pause he used to leave between them because he had grown so used to people’s laughter; the particular way he had of structuring his paragraphs, beginning and ending each with a joke that wasn’t really a joke, but an insult cloaked in a silken cape, is different. Even when they were working together, he knew that the Lucien of the office was not the Lucien of the country club, but he never saw that other Lucien. And now, finally, he has, he does; it is the only person he sees. This Lucien talks about the weather, and golf, and sailing, and taxes, but the tax laws he discusses are from twenty years ago. He never asks him anything about himself: who he is, what he does, why he is sometimes in a wheelchair. Lucien talks, and he smiles and nods back at him, wrapping his hands around his cooling cup of tea. When Lucien’s hands tremble, he takes them in his own, which he knows helps him when his hands shake: Willem used to do this, and breathe with him, and it would always calm him. When Lucien drools, he takes the edge of his napkin and blots the saliva away. Unlike him, however, Lucien doesn’t seem embarrassed by his own shaking and drooling, and he is relieved that he doesn’t. He’s not embarrassed for Lucien, either, but he is embarrassed by his inability to do more for him.

“He loves seeing you, Jude,” Meredith always says, but he doesn’t think this is true, really. He sometimes thinks he continues to come more for Meredith’s sake than for Lucien’s, and he realizes that this is the way it is, the way it must be: you don’t visit the lost, you visit the people who search for the lost. Lucien is not conscious of this, but he can remember being so when he was sick, both the first time and the second, and Willem was taking care of him. How grateful he was when he would wake and find someone other than Willem sitting next to him. “Roman’s with him,” Richard or Malcolm would say, or “He and JB went out for lunch,” and he’d relax. In the weeks after his amputations, when all he wanted to do was give up, those moments in which he could imagine that Willem might be being comforted were his only moments of happiness. And so he sits with Meredith after sitting with Lucien and they talk, although she too asks him nothing about his life, and this is fine with him. She is lonely; he is lonely, too. She and Lucien have two daughters, one of whom lives in New York but is forever going in and out of rehab; the other lives in Philadelphia with her husband and three children and is a lawyer herself.

He has met both of these daughters, who are a decade or so younger than he is, although Lucien is Harold’s age. When he went to visit Lucien in the hospital, the older of them, the one who lives in New York, had looked at him with such hatred that he had almost stepped back, and then had said to her sister, “Oh, and look who it is: Daddy’s pet. What a surprise.”

“Grow up, Portia,” the younger one had hissed. To him she said, “Jude, thanks for coming. I’m so sorry about Willem.”

“Thank you for coming, Jude,” Meredith says now, kissing him goodbye. “I’ll see you soon?” She always asks this, as if he might someday tell her she won’t.

“Yes,” he says. “I’ll e-mail you.”

“Do,” she says, and waves as he walks down the hall toward the elevator. He always has the sense that no one else visits, and yet how can that be? Don’t let that be, he pleads. Meredith and Lucien have always had lots of friends. They threw dinner parties. It wasn’t unusual to see Lucien leaving the offices in black tie, rolling his eyes as he waved goodbye to him. “Benefit,” he’d say as an explanation. “Party.” “Wedding.” “Dinner.”

After these visits he is always exhausted, but still he walks, seven blocks south and a quarter of a block east, to the Irvines’. For months he had avoided the Irvines, and then last month, on the one-year anniversary, they had asked him and Richard and JB to dinner at their house, and he knew he would have to go.

It was the weekend after Labor Day. The previous four weeks—four weeks that had included the day Willem would have turned fifty-three; the day that Willem had died—had been some of the worst he had ever experienced. He had known they would be bad; he had tried to plan accordingly. The firm had needed someone to go to Beijing, and although he knew he should have stayed in New York—he was working on a case that needed him more than the business in Beijing did—he volunteered anyway, and off he went. At first he had hoped he might be safe: the woolly numbness of jet lag was sometimes indistinguishable from the woolly numbness of his grief, and there were other things that were so physically uncomfortable—including the heat, which was woolly itself, woolly and sodden—that he had thought he would be able to distract himself. But then one night near the end of the trip he was being driven back to the hotel from a long day of meetings, and he had looked out of the car window and had seen, glittering over the road, a massive billboard of Willem’s face. It was a beer ad that Willem had shot two years ago, one that was only displayed throughout east Asia. But hanging from the top of the billboard were people on pulleys, and he realized that they were painting over the ad, that they were erasing Willem’s face. Suddenly, his breath left him, and he had almost asked the driver to stop, but he wouldn’t have been able to—they were on a loop of a road, one with no exits or places to pull over, and so he’d had to sit very still, his heart erupting within him, counting the beats it took to reach the hotel, thank the driver, get out, walk through the lobby, ride the elevator, walk down the hallway, and enter his room, where before he could think, he was throwing himself against the cold marble wall of the shower, his mouth open and his eyes shut, tossing and tossing himself until he was in so much pain that his every vertebrae felt as if it had been jolted out of its sockets.

That night he cut himself wildly, uncontrollably, and when he was shaking too badly to continue, he waited, and cleaned the floor, and drank some juice to give himself energy, and then started again. After three rounds of this he crept to the corner of the shower stall and wept, folding his arms over his head, making his hair tacky with blood, and that night he slept there, covered with a towel instead of a blanket. He had done this sometimes when he was a child and had felt like he was exploding, separating from himself like a dying star, and would feel the need to tuck himself into the smallest space he could find so his very bones would stay knit together. Then, he would carefully work himself out from beneath Brother Luke and ball himself on the filthy motel carpet under the bed, which was prickly with burrs and dropped thumbtacks and slimy with used condoms and strange damp spots, or he would sleep in the bathtub or in the closet, beetled up as tight as he was able. “My poor potato bug,” Brother Luke would say when he found him like this. “Why are you doing this, Jude?” He had been gentle, and worried, but he had never been able to explain it.