“Don’t say a word,” Harold warned him.

“What would I say?” he asked.

This year, Harold asked how he felt about trout. “Trout stuffed with other stuff,” he added.

“I like trout,” he’d answered, cautiously. “But you know, Harold, I actually like turkey.” They had a variation on this conversation every year, with Harold proposing various animals and proteins—steamed black-footed Chinese chicken, filet mignon, tofu with wood ear fungus, smoked whitefish salad on homemade rye—as turkey improvements.

“No one likes turkey, Jude,” Harold said, impatiently. “I know what you’re doing. Don’t insult me by pretending you do because you don’t think I’m actually capable of making anything else. We’re having trout, and that’s it. Also, can you make that cake you made last year? I think it’d go well with this wine I got. Just send me a list of what you need me to get.”

The perplexing thing, he always thought, was that in general, Harold wasn’t that interested in food (or wine). In fact, he had terrible taste, and was often taking him to restaurants that were overpriced yet mediocre, where Harold would happily devour dull plates of blackened meat and unimaginative sides of gloppy pasta. He and Julia (who also had little interest in food) discussed Harold’s strange fixation every year: Harold had numerous obsessions, some of them inexplicable, but this one seemed particularly so, and more so for its endurance.

Willem thought that Harold’s Thanksgiving quest had begun partly as shtick, but over the years, it had morphed into something more serious, and now he was truly unable to stop himself, even as he knew he’d never succeed.

“But you know,” Willem said, “it’s really all about you.”

“What do you mean?” he’d asked.

“It’s a performance for you,” Willem had said. “It’s his way of telling you he cares about you enough to try to impress you, without actually saying he cares about you.”

He’d dismissed this right away: “I don’t think so, Willem.” But sometimes, he pretended to himself that Willem might be right, feeling silly and a little pathetic because of how happy the thought made him.

Willem was the only one coming to Thanksgiving this year: by the time he and JB had reconciled, JB had already made plans to go to his aunts’ with Malcolm; when he’d tried to cancel, they had apparently been so irked that he’d decided not to antagonize them further.

“What’s it going to be this year?” asked Willem. They were taking the train up on Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving. “Elk? Venison? Turtle?”

“Trout,” he said.

“Trout!” Willem replied. “Well, trout’s easy. We may actually end up with trout this year.”

“He said he was going to stuff it with something, though.”

“Oh. I take it back.”

There were eight of them at dinner: Harold and Julia, Laurence and Gillian, Julia’s friend James and his boyfriend Carey, and he and Willem.

“This is dynamite trout, Harold,” Willem said, cutting into his second piece of turkey, and everyone laughed.

What was the point, he wondered, at which he had stopped feeling so nervous and out of place at Harold’s dinners? Certainly, his friends had helped. Harold liked sparring with them, liked trying to provoke JB into making outrageous and borderline racist statements, liked teasing Willem about when he was going to settle down, liked debating structural and aesthetic trends with Malcolm. He knew Harold enjoyed engaging with them, and that they enjoyed it too, and it gave him the chance to simply listen to them being who they were without feeling the need to participate; they were a fleet of parrots shaking their bright-colored feathers at one another, presenting themselves to their peers without fear or guile.

The dinner was dominated by talk of James’s daughter, who was getting married in the summer. “I’m an old man,” James moaned, and Laurence and Gillian, whose daughters were still in college and spending the holiday at their friend’s house in Carmel, made sympathetic noises.

“This reminds me,” said Harold, looking at him and Willem, “when are you two ever going to settle down?”

“I think he means you,” he smiled at Willem.

“Harold, I’m thirty-two!” Willem protested, and everyone laughed again as Harold spluttered: “What is that, Willem? Is that an explanation? Is that a defense? It’s not like you’re sixteen!”

But as much as he enjoyed the evening, a part of his mind remained abuzz and anxious, worrying about the conversation Harold and Julia wanted to have with him the next day. He had finally mentioned it to Willem on the ride up, and in moments, when the two of them were working together (stuffing the turkey, blanching the potatoes, setting the table), they would try to figure out what Harold might have to say to him. After dinner, they put on their coats and sat in the back garden, puzzling over it again.

At least he knew that nothing was wrong with them—it was the first thing he had asked, and Harold had assured him that he and Julia were both fine. But what, then, could it be?

“Maybe he thinks I’m hanging around them too much,” he suggested to Willem. Maybe Harold was, simply, sick of him.

“Not possible,” Willem said, so quickly and declaratively that he was relieved. They were quiet. “Maybe one of them got a job offer somewhere and they’re moving?”

“I thought of that, too. But I don’t think Harold would ever leave Boston. Julia, either.”

There weren’t, in the end, many options, at least many that would make a conversation with him necessary: maybe they were selling the house in Truro (but why would they need to talk to him about that, as much as he loved the house). Maybe Harold and Julia were splitting up (but they seemed the same as they always did around each other). Maybe they were selling the New York apartment and wanted to know if he wanted to buy it from them (unlikely: he was certain they would never sell the apartment). Maybe they were renovating the apartment and needed him to oversee the renovation.

And then their speculations grew more specific and improbable: maybe Julia was coming out (maybe Harold was). Maybe Harold was being born again (maybe Julia was). Maybe they were quitting their jobs, moving to an ashram in upstate New York. Maybe they were becoming ascetics who would live in a remote Kashmiri valley. Maybe they were having his-and-hers plastic surgery. Maybe Harold was becoming a Republican. Maybe Julia had found God. Maybe Harold had been nominated to be the attorney general. Maybe Julia had been identified by the Tibetan government in exile as the next reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and was moving to Dharamsala. Maybe Harold was running for president as a Socialist candidate. Maybe they were opening a restaurant on the square that served only turkey stuffed with other kinds of meat. By this time they were both laughing so hard, as much from the nervous, self-soothing helplessness of not knowing as from the absurdity of their guesses, that they were bent over in their chairs, pressing their coat collars to their mouths to muffle the noise, their tears freezing pinchingly on their cheeks.

In bed, though, he returned to the thought that had crept, tendril-like, from some dark space of his mind and had insinuated itself into his consciousness like a thin green vine: maybe one of them had discovered something about the person he once was. Maybe he would be presented with evidence—a doctor’s report, a photograph, a (this was the nightmare scenario) film still. He had already decided he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t argue against it, he wouldn’t defend himself. He would acknowledge its veracity, he would apologize, he would explain that he never meant to deceive them, he would offer not to contact them again, and then he would leave. He would ask them only to keep his secret, to not tell anyone else. He practiced saying the words: I’m so sorry, Harold. I’m so sorry, Julia. I never meant to embarrass you. But of course it was such a useless apology. He might not have meant to, but it wouldn’t make a difference: he would have; he had.