On Friday he saw Andy, who wasn't approving (he hadn't gained any weight), but also didn't lecture him (nor had he lost any), and the next day he flew to Boston. He didn't tell anyone he was going, not even Harold. Julia, he knew, was at a conference in Costa Rica; but Harold, he knew, would be home.

Julia had given him a set of keys six years ago, when he was arriving for Thanksgiving at a time when both she and Harold happened to have department meetings, so he let himself into the house and poured a glass of water, looking out at the back garden as he drank. It was just before noon, and Harold would still be at his tennis game, so he went to the living room to wait for him. But he fell asleep, and when he woke, it was to Harold shaking his shoulder and urgently repeating his name.

"Harold," he said, sitting up, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry; I should've called."

"Jesus," Harold said, panting; he smelled cold and sharp. "Are you all right, Jude? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, nothing," he said, hearing before he said it how absurd his explanation was, "I just thought I'd stop by."

"Well," said Harold, momentarily silent. "It's good to see you." He sat in his chair and looked at him. "You've been something of a stranger these past few weeks."

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."

Harold shrugged. "No apologies necessary. I'm just glad you're okay."

"Yes," he said. "I'm okay."

Harold tilted his head. "You don't look too good."

He smiled. "I've had the flu." He gazed up at the ceiling, as if his lines might be written there. "The forsythia's falling down, you know."

"I know. It's been a windy winter."

"I'll help you stake it, if you want."

Harold looked at him for a long moment then, his mouth slightly moving, as if he was both trying and not trying to speak. Finally he said, "Yeah. Let's go do that."

Outside it was abruptly, insultingly cold, and both of them began sniffling. He positioned the stake and Harold hammered it into the ground, although the earth was frozen and chipped up into pottery-like shards as he did. After they'd gotten it deep enough, Harold handed him lengths of twine, and he tied the center stalks of the bush to the stake, snugly enough so they'd be secure, but not so snug that they'd be constricted. He worked slowly, making sure the knots were tight, snapping off a few branches that were too bent to recover.

"Harold," he said, when he was halfway down the bush, "I wanted to talk to you about something, but-I don't know where to begin." Stupid, he told himself. This is such a stupid idea. You were so stupid to think any of this could ever happen. He opened his mouth to continue and then shut it, and then opened it again: he was a fish, dumbly blowing bubbles, and he wished he had never come, had never begun speaking.

"Jude," said Harold, "tell me. Whatever it is." He stopped. "Are you having second thoughts?"

"No," he said. "No, nothing like that." They were silent. "Are you?"

"No, of course not."

He finished the last tie and brought himself to his feet, Harold deliberately not helping him. "I don't want to tell you this," he said, and looked down at the forsythia, its bare twiggy ugliness. "But I have to because-because I don't want to be deceitful with you. But Harold-I think you think I'm one kind of person, and I'm not."

Harold was quiet. "What kind of person do I think you are?"

"A good person," he said. "Someone decent."

"Well," said Harold, "you're right. I do."

"But-I'm not," he said, and could feel his eyes grow hot, despite the cold. "I've done things that-that good people don't do," he continued, lamely. "And I just think you should know that about me. That I've done terrible things, things I'm ashamed of, and if you knew, you'd be ashamed to know me, much less be related to me."

"Jude," Harold said at last. "I can't imagine anything you might have done that would change the way I feel about you. I don't care what you did before. Or rather-I do care; I would love to hear about your life before we met. But I've always had the feeling, the very strong feeling, that you never wanted to discuss it." He stopped and waited. "Do you want to discuss it now? Do you want to tell me?"

He shook his head. He wanted to and didn't want to, both. "I can't," he said. Beneath the small of his back, he felt the first unfurlings of discomfort, a blackened seed spreading its thorned branches. Not now, he begged himself, not now, a plea as impossible as the plea he really meant: Not now, not ever.

"Well," Harold sighed, "in the absence of specifics, I won't be able to reassure you specifically, so I'm just going to give you a blanket, all-encompassing reassurance, which I hope you'll believe. Jude: whatever it is, whatever you did, I promise you, whether you someday tell me or not, that it will never make me regret wanting or having you as a member of my family." He took a deep breath, held his right hand before him. "Jude St. Francis, as your future parent, I hereby absolve you of-of everything for which you seek absolution."

And was this what he in fact wanted? Absolution? He looked at Harold's face, so familiar he could remember its every furrow when he closed his eyes, and which, despite the flourishes and formality of his declaration, was serious and unsmiling. Could he believe Harold? The hardest thing is not finding the knowledge, Brother Luke once said to him after he'd confessed he was having difficulty believing in God. The hardest thing is believing it. He felt he had failed once again: failed to confess properly, failed to determine in advance what he wanted to hear in response. Wouldn't it have been easier in a way if Harold had told him that he was right, that they should perhaps rethink the adoption? He would have been devastated, of course, but it would have been an old sensation, something he understood. In Harold's refusal to let him go lay a future he couldn't imagine, one in which someone might really want him for good, and that was a reality that he had never experienced before, for which he had no preparation, no signposts. Harold would lead and he would follow, until one day he would wake and Harold would be gone, and he would be left vulnerable and stranded in a foreign land, with no one there to guide him home.

Harold was waiting for his reply, but the pain was now unignorable, and he knew he had to rest. "Harold," he said. "I'm sorry. But I think-I think I'd better go lie down for a while."

"Go," said Harold, unoffended, "go."

In his room, he lies down atop the comforter and closes his eyes, but even after the episode ends, he's exhausted, and tells himself he'll nap for just a few minutes and then get up again and see what Harold has in the house: if he has brown sugar, he'll bake something-there was a bowl of persimmons in the kitchen, and maybe he'll make a persimmon cake.

But he doesn't wake up. Not when Harold comes to check on him in the next hour and places the back of his hand against his cheek and then drapes a blanket over him; not when Harold checks on him again, right before dinner. He sleeps through his phone ringing at midnight and again at six a.m., and through the house phone ringing at twelve thirty and then at six thirty, and Harold's conversations with first Andy and then Willem. He sleeps into the morning, and through lunch, and only wakes when he feels Harold's hand on his shoulder and hears Harold saying his name, telling him his flight's leaving in a few hours.

Before he wakes, he dreams of a man standing in a field. He can't see the man's features, but he is tall and thin, and he's helping another, older man hitch the hulk of a tractor carapace to the back of a truck. He knows he's in Montana from the whitened, curved-bowl vastness of the sky, and from the particular kind of cold there, which is completely without moisture and which feels somehow purer than cold he's felt anywhere else.

He still can't see the man's features, but he thinks he knows who he is, recognizes his long strides and his way of crossing his arms in front of him as he listens to the other man. "Cody," he calls out in his dream, and the man turns, but he's too far away, and so he can't quite tell if, under the brim of the man's baseball cap, they share the same face.

The fifteenth is a Friday, which he takes off from work. There had been some talk of a dinner party on Thursday night, but in the end, they settle on an early lunch the day of the ceremony (as JB calls it). Their court appointment is at ten, and after it's over, everyone will come back to the house to eat.

Harold had wanted to call a caterer, but he insisted he'd cook, and he spends the remains of Thursday evening in the kitchen. He does the baking that night-the chocolate-walnut cake Harold likes; the tarte tatin Julia likes; the sourdough bread they both like-and picks through ten pounds of crab and mixes the meat with egg and onion and parsley and bread crumbs and forms them into patties. He cleans the potatoes and gives the carrots a quick scrub, and chops the ends off the brussels sprouts, so that the next day all he'll have to do is toss them in oil and shove them into the oven. He shakes the cartons of figs into a bowl, which he'll roast and serve over ice cream topped with honey and balsamic vinaigrette. They are all of Harold and Julia's favorite dishes, and he is glad to make them, glad to have something to give them, however small. Throughout the evening, Harold and Julia wander in and out, and although he tells them not to, they wash dishes and pans as he dirties them, pour him glasses of water and wine, and ask if they can help him, even though he tells them they should relax. Finally they leave for bed, and although he promises them that he will as well, he instead stays up, the kitchen bright and silent around him, singing quietly, his hands moving to keep the mania at bay.

The past few days have been very difficult, some of the most difficult he can remember, so difficult that one night he even called Andy after their midnight check-in, and when Andy offered to meet him at a diner at two a.m., he accepted the offer and went, desperate to get himself out of the apartment, which suddenly seemed full of irresistible temptations: razors, of course, but also knives and scissors and matches, and staircases to throw himself down. He knows that if he goes to his room now, he won't be able to stop himself from heading directly to the bathroom, where he has long kept a bag, its contents identical to the one at Lispenard Street, taped to the sink's undercarriage: his arms ache with yearning, and he is determined not to give in. He has both dough and batter left over, and decides he'll make a tart with pine nuts and cranberries, and maybe a round flat cake glazed with slices of oranges and honey: by the time both are done baking, it will almost be daylight and he will be past danger and will have sucessfully saved himself.

Malcolm and JB will both be at the courthouse the next day; they're taking the morning flight. But Willem, who was supposed to be there, won't; he called the week before to say filming had been delayed, and he'll now be coming home on the eighteenth, not the fourteenth. He knows there's nothing to be done about this, but still, he mourns Willem's absence almost fiercely: a day like this without Willem won't be a day at all. "Call me the second it's over," Willem had said. "It's killing me I can't be there."

He did, however, invite Andy in one of their midnight conversations, which he grew to enjoy: in those talks, they discussed everyday things, calming things, normal things-the new Supreme Court justice nominee; the most recent health-care bill (he approved of it; Andy didn't); a biography of Rosalind Franklin they'd both read (he liked it; Andy didn't); the apartment that Andy and Jane were renovating. He liked the novelty of hearing Andy say, with real outrage, "Jude, you've got to be fucking kidding me!," which he was used to hearing when being confronted about his cutting, or his amateurish bandaging skills, instead applied to his opinions about movies, and the mayor, and books, and even paint colors. Once he learned that Andy wouldn't use their talks as an occasion to reprimand him, or lecture him, he relaxed into them, and even managed to learn some more things about Andy himself: Andy spoke of his twin, Beckett, also a doctor, a heart surgeon, who lived in San Francisco and whose boyfriend Andy hated and was scheming to get Beckett to dump; and how Jane's parents were giving them their house on Shelter Island; and how Andy had been on the football team in high school, the very Americanness of which had made his parents uneasy; and how he had spent his junior year abroad in Siena, where he dated a girl from Lucca and gained twenty pounds. It wasn't that he and Andy never spoke of Andy's personal life-they did to some extent after every appointment-but on the phone he talked more, and he was able to pretend that Andy was only his friend and not his doctor, despite the fact that this illusion was belied by the call's very premise.

"Obviously, you shouldn't feel obligated to come," he added, hastily, after inviting Andy to the court date.

"I'd love to come," Andy said. "I was wondering when I'd be invited."

Then he felt bad. "I just didn't want you to feel you had to spend even more time with your weird patient who already makes your life so difficult," he said.

"You're not just my weird patient, Jude," Andy said. "You're also my weird friend." He paused. "Or at least, I hope you are."

He smiled into the phone. "Of course I am," he said. "I'm honored to be your weird friend."

And so Andy was coming as well: he'd fly back that afternoon, but Malcolm and JB would spend the night, and they'd all leave together on Saturday.

Upon arriving, he had been surprised, and then moved, to see how thoroughly Harold and Julia had cleaned the house, and how proud they were of the work they'd done. "Look!" one or the other kept saying, triumphantly pointing at a surface-a table, a chair, a corner of floor-that would normally have been obscured by stacks of books or journals, but which was now clear of all clutter. There were flowers everywhere-winter flowers: bunches of decorative cabbages and white-budded dogwood branches and paperwhite bulbs, with their sweet, faintly fecal fragrance-and the books in their cases had been straightened and even the nap on the sofa had been repaired.

"And look at this, Jude," Julia had said, linking her arm through his, and showing him the celadon-glazed dish on the hallway table, which had been broken for as long as he'd known them, the shards that had snapped off its side permanently nested in the bowl and furred with dust. But now it had been fixed, and washed and polished.

"Wow," he said when presented with each new thing, grinning idiotically, happy because they were so happy. He didn't care, he never had, whether their place was clean or not-they could've lived surrounded by Ionic columns of old New York Times, with colonies of rats squeaking plumply underfoot for all he cared-but he knew they thought he minded, and had mistaken his incessant, tedious cleaning of everything as a rebuke, as much as he'd tried, and tried, to assure them it wasn't. He cleaned now to stop himself, to distract himself, from doing other things, but when he was in college, he had cleaned for the others to express his gratitude: it was something he could do and had always done, and they gave him so much and he gave them so little. JB, who enjoyed living in squalor, never noticed. Malcolm, who had grown up with a housekeeper, always noticed and always thanked him. Only Willem hadn't liked it. "Stop it, Jude," he'd said one day, grabbing his wrist as he picked JB's dirty shirts off the floor, "you're not our maid." But he hadn't been able to stop, not then, and not now.

By the time he wipes off the countertops a final time, it's almost four thirty, and he staggers to his room, texts Willem not to call him, and falls into a brief, brutal sleep. When he wakes, he makes the bed and showers and dresses and returns to the kitchen, where Harold is standing at the counter, reading the paper and drinking coffee.

"Well," Harold says, looking up at him. "Don't you look handsome."

He shakes his head, reflexively, but the truth is that he'd bought a new tie, and had his hair cut the day before, and he feels, if not handsome, then at least neat and presentable, which he always tries to be. He rarely sees Harold in a suit, but he's wearing one as well, and the solemnity of the occasion makes him suddenly shy.

Harold smiles at him. "You were busy last night, clearly. Did you sleep at all?"

He smiles back. "Enough."

"Julia's getting ready," says Harold, "but I have something for you."

"For me?"

"Yes," says Harold, and picks up a small leather box, about the size of a baseball, from beside his coffee mug and holds it out to him. He opens it and inside is Harold's watch, with its round white face and sober, forthright numbers. The band has been replaced with a new black crocodile one.

"My father gave this to me when I turned thirty," says Harold, when he doesn't say anything. "It was his. And you are still thirty, so I at least haven't messed up the symmetry of this." He takes the box from him and removes the watch and reverses it so he can see the initials engraved on the back of the face: SS/HS/JSF. "Saul Stein," says Harold. "That was my father. And then HS for me, and JSF for you." He returns the watch to him.

He runs his thumbtip lightly over the initials. "I can't accept this, Harold," he says, finally.

"Sure you can," Harold says. "It's yours, Jude. I already bought a new one; you can't give it back."

He can feel Harold looking at him. "Thank you," he says, at last. "Thank you." He can't seem to say anything else.

"It's my pleasure," says Harold, and neither of them says anything for a few seconds, until he comes to himself and unclasps his watch and fastens Harold's-his, now-around his wrist, holding his arm up for Harold, who nods. "Nice," he says. "It looks good on you."

He's about to reply with something (what?), when he hears, and then sees, JB and Malcolm, both in suits as well.

"The door was unlocked," JB says, as Malcolm sighs. "Harold!" he hugs him, "Congratulations! It's a boy!"

"I'm sure Harold's never heard that one before," says Malcolm, waving hello at Julia, who's entering the kitchen.

Andy arrives next, and then Gillian; they'll meet Laurence at the courthouse.

The doorbell rings again. "Are we expecting someone else?" he asks Harold, who shrugs: "Can you get it, Jude?"

So he opens the door, and there is Willem. He stares at Willem for a second, and then, before he can tell himself to be calm, Willem springs at him like a civet cat and hugs him so hard that for a moment he fears he will tip over. "Are you surprised?" Willem says into his ear, and he can tell from his voice that he's smiling. It's the second time that morning he's unable to speak.

The court will be the third time. They take two cars, and in his (driven by Harold, with Malcolm in the front seat), Willem explains that his departure date actually had been changed; but when it was changed back again, he didn't tell him, only the others, so that his appearance would be a surprise. "Yeah, thanks for that, Willem," says Malcolm, "I had to monitor JB like the CIA to make sure he didn't say anything."

They go not to the family courts but to the appeals court on Pemberton Square. Inside Laurence's courtroom-Laurence unfamiliar in his robes: it is a day of everyone in costume-he and Harold and Julia make their promises to each other, Laurence smiling the entire time, and then there is a flurry of picture-taking, with everyone taking photos of everyone else in various arrangements and configurations. He is the only one who doesn't take any at all, as he's in every one.

He's standing with Harold and Julia, waiting for Malcolm to figure out his enormous, complicated camera, when JB calls his name, and all three of them look over, and JB takes the shot. "Got it," says JB. "Thanks."

"JB, this'd better not be for-" he begins, but then Malcolm announces he's ready, and the three of them swivel obediently toward him.

They're back at the house by noon, and soon people start arriving-Gillian and Laurence and James and Carey, and Julia's colleagues and Harold's, some of whom he hasn't seen since he had classes with them in law school. His old voice teacher comes, as does Dr. Li, his math professor, and Dr. Kashen, his master's adviser, and Allison, his former boss at Batter, and a friend of all of theirs from Hood Hall, Lionel, who teaches physics at Wellesley. People come and go all afternoon, going to and from classes, meetings, trials. He had initially been reluctant to have such a gathering, with so many people-wouldn't his acquisition of Harold and Julia as parents provoke, even encourage, questions about why he was parentless at all?-but as the hours pass, and no one asks any questions, no one demands to know why he needs a new set anyway, he finds himself forgetting his fears. He knows his telling other people about the adoption is a form of bragging, and that bragging has its own consequences, but he cannot help himself. Just this once, he implores whoever in the world is responsible for punishing him for his bad behavior. Let me celebrate this thing that has happened to me just this once.

There is no etiquette for such a party, and so their guests have invented their own: Malcolm's parents have sent a magnum of champagne and a case of super Tuscan from a vineyard they partly own outside of Montalcino. JB's mother sent him with a burlap sack of heirloom narcissus bulbs for Harold and Julia, and a card for him; his aunts have sent an orchid. The U.S. Attorney sends an enormous crate of fruit, with a card signed by Marshall and Citizen and Rhodes as well. People bring wine and flowers. Allison, who had years ago revealed him to Harold as the creator of the bacteria cookies, brings four dozen decorated with his original designs, which makes him blush and Julia shout with delight. The rest of the day is a binging on all things sweet: everything he does that day is perfect, everything he says comes out right. People reach for him and he doesn't move or shy away from them; they touch him and he lets them. His face hurts from smiling. Decades of approbation, of affection are stuffed into this one afternoon, and he gorges on it, reeling from the strangeness of it all. He overhears Andy arguing with Dr. Kashen about a massive new proposed landfill project in Gurgaon, watches Willem listen patiently to his old torts professor, eavesdrops on JB explaining to Dr. Li why the New York art scene is irretrievably fucked, spies Malcolm and Carey trying to extract the largest of the crab cakes without toppling the rest of the stack.

By the early evening, everyone has left, and it is just the six of them sprawled out in the living room: he and Harold and Julia and Malcolm and JB and Willem. The house is once again messy. Julia mentions dinner, but everyone-even he-has eaten too much, and no one, not even JB, wants to think about it. JB has given Harold and Julia a painting of him, saying, before he hands it over to them, "It's not based on a photo, just from sketches." The painting, which JB has done in watercolors and ink on a sheet of stiff paper, is of his face and neck, and is in a different style than he associates with JB's work: sparer and more gestural, in a somber, grayed palette. In it, his right hand is hovering over the base of his throat, as if he's about to grab it and throttle himself, and his mouth is slightly open, and his pupils are very large, like a cat's in gloom. It's undeniably him-he even recognizes the gesture as his own, although he can't, in the moment, remember what it's meant to signal, or what emotion it accompanies. The face is slightly larger than life-size, and all of them stare at it in silence.

"It's a really good piece," JB says at last, sounding pleased. "Let me know if you ever want to sell it, Harold," and finally, everyone laughs.

"JB, it's so, so beautiful-thank you so much," says Julia, and Harold echoes her. He is finding it difficult, as he always does when confronted with JB's pictures of him, to separate the beauty of the art itself from the distaste he feels for his own image, but he doesn't want to be ungracious, and so he repeats their praise.

"Wait, I have something, too," Willem says, heading for the bedroom, and returning with a wooden statue, about eighteen inches high, of a bearded man in hydrangea-blue robes, a curl of flames, like a cobra's hood, surrounding his reddish hair, his right arm held diagonally against his chest, his left by his side.

"Fuck's that dude?" asks JB.

"This dude," Willem replies, "is Saint Jude, also known as Judas Thaddeus." He puts him on the coffee table, turns him toward Julia and Harold. "I got him at a little antiques store in Bucharest," he tells them. "They said it's late nineteenth-century, but I don't know-I think he's probably just a village carving. Still, I liked him. He's handsome and stately, just like our Jude."

"I agree," says Harold, picking up the statue and holding it in his hands. He strokes the figure's pleated robe, his wreath of fire. "Why's his head on fire?"

"It's to symbolize that he was at Pentecost and received the holy spirit," he hears himself saying, the old knowledge never far, cluttering up his mind's cellar. "He was one of the apostles."

"How'd you know that?" Malcolm asks, and Willem, who's sitting next to him, touches his arm. "Of course you know," Willem says, quietly. "I always forget," and he feels a rush of gratitude for Willem, not for remembering, but for forgetting.

"The patron saint of lost causes," adds Julia, taking the statue from Harold, and the words come to him at once: Pray for us, Saint Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, pray for us-when he was a child, it was his final prayer of the night, and it wasn't until he was older that he would be ashamed of his name, of how it seemed to announce him to the world, and would wonder if the brothers had intended it as he was certain others saw it: as a mockery; as a diagnosis; as a prediction. And yet it also felt, at times, like it was all that was truly his, and although there had been moments he could have, even should have changed it, he never did. "Willem, thank you," Julia says. "I love him."

"Me too," says Harold. "Guys, this is all really sweet of you."

He, too, has brought a present for Harold and Julia, but as the day has passed, it's come to seem ever-smaller and more foolish. Years ago, Harold had mentioned that he and Julia had heard a series of Schubert's early lieder performed in Vienna when they were on their honeymoon. But Harold couldn't remember which ones they had loved, and so he had made up his own list, and augmented it with a few other songs he liked, mostly Bach and Mozart, and then rented a small sound booth and recorded a disc of himself singing them: every few months or so, Harold asks him to sing for them, but he's always too shy to do so. Now, though, the gift feels misguided and tinny, as well as shamefully boastful, and he is embarrassed by his own presumption. Yet he can't bring himself to throw it away. And so, when everyone is standing and stretching and saying their good nights, he slips away and wedges the disc, and the letters he's written each of them, between two books-a battered copy of Common Sense and a frayed edition of White Noise-on a low shelf, where they might sit, undiscovered, for decades.

Normally, Willem stays with JB in the upstairs study, as he's the only one who can tolerate JB's snoring, and Malcolm stays with him downstairs. But that evening, as everyone heads off for bed, Malcolm volunteers that he'll share with JB, so that he and Willem can catch up with each other.

" 'Night, lovers," JB calls down the staircase at them.

As they get ready for bed, Willem tells him more stories from the set: about the lead actress, who perspired so much that her entire face had to be dusted with powder every two takes; about the lead actor, who played the devil, and who was constantly trying to curry favor with the grips by buying them beers and asking them who wanted to play football, but who then had a tantrum when he couldn't remember his lines; about the nine-year-old British actor playing the actress's son, who had approached Willem at the craft services table to tell him that he really shouldn't be eating crackers because they were empty calories, and wasn't he afraid of getting fat? Willem talks and talks, and he laughs as he brushes his teeth and washes his face.

But when the lights are turned off and they are both lying in the dark, he in the bed, Willem on the sofa (after an argument in which he tried to get Willem to take the bed himself), Willem says, gently, "The apartment's really fucking clean."

"I know," he winces. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Willem says. "But Jude-was it really awful?"

He understands then that Andy did tell Willem at least some of what had happened, and so he decides to answer honestly. "It wasn't great," he allows, and then, because he doesn't want Willem to feel guilty, "but it wasn't horrible."

They are both quiet. "I wish I could've been there," Willem says.

"You were," he assures him. "But Willem-I missed you."

Very quietly, Willem says, "I missed you, too."

"Thank you for coming," he says.

"Of course I was going to come, Judy," Willem says from across the room. "I would've no matter what."

He is silent, savoring this promise and committing it to memory so he can think about it in moments when he needs it most. "Do you think it went all right?" he asks.

"Are you serious?" Willem says, and he can hear him sit up. "Did you see Harold's face? He looked like the Green Party just elected its first president and the Second Amendment was eliminated and the Red Sox were canonized, all in the same day."

He laughs. "You really think so?"