I decided to let her be.

I'd called Atlanta from my room in the Northwestern, and when I hung up the phone for the day something kept me right there in the little room. I pulled a chair over to the window and looked out at the city.

I don't know how long I sat there. I started off thinking about the case I was working on, the club of thirty-one. I thought how their ranks had thinned over the past three decades, and before I knew it I was thinking of my own life over the same span of years, and the awful toll those years had taken. I thought of the people I'd lost, some to death, some because our lives had slipped off in different directions. My ex-wife, Anita, long since remarried. The last time I'd spoken to her was to offer condolences for her mother's death. The last time I'd seen her- I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen her.

My sons, Michael and Andrew, both of them grown, both of them strangers to me. Michael was living in northern California, a sales rep for a company that supplied components to manufacturers of computers. In the four years since he graduated from college I'd spoken to him ten times at the outside. Two years ago he got married to a girl named June, and he'd sent me their wedding picture. She is Chinese, very short and slender, her expression in the photograph utterly serious. Mike started putting on weight in college, and now he looks like a bluff, hearty salesman, fat and jolly, posed incongruously next to this inscrutable daughter of the Orient.

"We'll have to get together," he says when we speak on the phone. "Next time I get to New York I'll let you know. We'll have dinner, maybe catch a Knicks game."

"Maybe I could get out to the Coast," I suggested the last time I talked to him. There was just the slightest pause, and then he was quick to assure me that would be great, really great, but right now wasn't a good time. A very busy time at work these days, and he was traveling a lot, and-