The chart. The name. Looking up and knowing him. It was as though something had put us in that room.
Six days after he died, I had the shape of it already, and it had the word fate in it.
And I have given that version to about forty people since, and it has got better, and there is a point near the end where I stop for a second before I say and then he asked me.
And what I have been running, for eighteen months, is a story in which two people were brought together.
And the actual story is two people who each spent a year quietly steering, and then met in a corridor and both pretended to be astonished.
Which is, if anything, a better story. It is certainly a funnier one.
And I cannot tell it, because telling it means saying out loud, at seventy-three, in the town I grew up in, that I moved home and took the worse job on purpose.
