PART 3:

Jake lost the first game in 20 moves, which told Martin that Jake was not a chess player who pretended to lose. He lost the second game in 38 moves, which told Martin that Jake was a fast learner. Martin won both, but he filled their glasses a second time, which was its own kind of assessment. The third was the video call.

Lily called at 8:30 to say goodnight. Jake took the phone into the hallway. He didn’t try to hide it. He sat on the bottom step of the staircase and talked to his daughter for 10 minutes about whether Grandma had let her stay up for the nature documentary and whether Gerald had made any strange noises on the drive over.

Carol Lawson passed through the hallway twice. The second time, she paused. Is that your little girl? She asked, quietly enough not to intrude. Yes, ma’am. She wanted to say goodnight. Carol looked at him for a long moment. Then she said, equally quietly, Tell her goodnight from us. Jake did. Later, Emma found her mother standing at the kitchen window after everyone else had gone to bed. Carol turned.

She had her tea. She looked at her daughter for a moment with the expression Emma had spent her entire adult life interpreting and still couldn’t quite read. That little girl, Carol said, needs a family that’s actually present. Emma opened her mouth and closed it again. I’m just saying, Carol added, turning back to the window, that a man who talks to his child like that before she goes to sleep is a particular kind of man.

Emma went to bed without responding. She lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the lake. She found him at 11:50, sitting on the back deck with a glass of water and the far-off look of someone running calculations that wouldn’t come out even. Emma wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and sat in the other chair. Neither of them spoke for a while.

The lake reflected the last of the autumn moon in pieces, broken by the small current at the shallow end of the dock. You’re good at this, Emma said eventually. Jake looked at her. The chess. The pump. My mother. She paused. My father. I’m just being a person, Jake said. That’s exactly what I mean. He didn’t answer that.

He looked back out at the water. Emma pulled the blanket tighter. Can I tell you something that has nothing to do with the agreement? Sure, she told him. She had never told anyone outside her immediate circle, and even there, she told it in the abbreviated version, the one where she had been engaged.

Her fiance had died in a car accident, and she had subsequently dedicated herself to her company. That version was true and sufficient and contained nothing that could be used against her. This version was different. She told him about the morning of the accident, how she had been running late to meet him and had texted him to change the meeting point, and he had been reading the text, they believed, when the light changed.

She had never told the investigators that. She had never told her parents. She had told exactly no one. She stopped. The silence after was very specific. Jake sat with it for a while. What was his name? he asked. Nicholas. You’ve been carrying that for a long time. Seven years, Emma said. Give or take. Another silence. The lake moved.

Can I tell you something? Jake said. He told her about Rachel. Not about the diagnosis or the treatment or the specific mechanics of how you lose a person to illness over 14 months. Those were facts, and he’d said those facts enough times that they had worn down to smooth stones. No edges left.

He told her about the Tuesday morning 6 weeks before she died, when Rachel had insisted on making pancakes from scratch, and they had stood in the kitchen together, and she had burned the first batch and laughed, and Jake had known, with the kind of knowing that bypasses logic entirely, that he was watching the last good morning. He stopped.

Emma was looking at him. Lily was three, he said. She doesn’t remember much of it. Which is, I don’t know. Emma nodded. She understood both things at once. They sat there for another hour. The conversation moved slowly, without agenda, through the kind of territory that people usually only cover after years, and which they covered now because the dark and the water and the specific honesty of exhaustion made it possible.

Jake had He was no longer sure what he was. Martin Lawson had a 20-ft wooden day cruiser in the boathouse that had not run properly in two seasons. He hadn’t asked Jake to look at it. He had simply mentioned at breakfast that it had been giving him trouble. Jake asked what kind of trouble. By noon, they were both in the boathouse.

Jake had the engine cowling off. Martin was handing him tools with the methodical efficiency of a man who was accustomed to being useful and had not been for several hours. They worked mostly in silence, the comfortable kind, occasionally punctuated by Martin asking a question and Jake answering it without making the answer complicated.

Emma stood on the dock and watched them through the boathouse window. She had grown up watching her father operate in rooms full of people, boardrooms, charity galas, city council meetings with the brisk authority of a man who expected to be the most competent person present. She had never, in 31 years, seen him hand someone tools.

Carol appeared beside her. Your father took apart a lawnmower engine with the neighbor’s boy once, Carol said. 19 years ago. I had nearly forgotten. Emma said nothing. He’s been looking for someone to do that with again. Carol tucked her hands into her cardigan pockets. Not the engine. Just that. The working side by side.

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