Ethan talked about gargoyles for forty-five minutes.
I sat on the floor of the hotel suite and held the plastic strut he had handed me and listened
to every word, and somewhere in the middle of a very detailed explanation of why the
Chrysler Building’s drainage system was misunderstood by most people, I made a decision.
I was going to go to Adrian in the morning and tell him everything.
Not through Daniel. Not through a phone call. Face to face, in a room, the full account,
the way it deserved to be told.
Ethan went to bed at nine. I sat in the quiet of the suite for a while after and thought about
Charles’s face in that conference room. About all the things carried in silence in this family
for three generations and what it costs when nobody says the true thing out loud.
Then I
