“I’m sorry about Joel,” he said.

“How do you-”

“Mary called me.”

“Mary did?” My best and oldest friend? Sandbagged me like that?

“Can I buy you a cup of tea?”

“I… I don’t think-”

“Please.”

Just that, just “please.” Anything else-any long explanation, any attempt at apology, especially any excuses-and I’d have hung up. But there was just that one “please,” and silence.

“Come to my office,” I said. “I have tea here.”

Some things surprise you, but some don’t. Bill showed up carrying a large black coffee. The offer of tea had been an olive branch, but that didn’t mean whatever peace terms he was proposing would include him drinking any.

“Long time,” I said, shutting the door behind him.

He sat in the chair across the desk. Were there really more lines on his face than last time I saw him?

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“About Joel? Or about the long time?”

“Both.”

“Who the hell asked you?”

A pause. “If I shouldn’t have come-”

“Oh, shut up.”

He did.

I sipped my tea. Jasmine, what my mother used to give us when we didn’t feel well. “It’s just, I don’t think it’s okay that you get to make that decision unilaterally.”

“What decision?”

“About who isn’t good for who and who could do better without who and who should stay away from who and who gets back in touch with who. And don’t tell me some of those ‘whos’ should be ‘whoms.’ ”

“They should, though.”

“I know!”

He drank his coffee. “Listen: I fucked up big. I needed time to think about that. If I-”

“When did I ever not give you time? Did I ever crowd you? Why couldn’t you have called and said, ‘I need time. I’m going to the cabin, I’m locking myself in my apartment, I’m shooting myself into space?’ Just to call and acknowledge I still existed. Why couldn’t you do that? Before you went off to meditate on what a fuckup you are?”