“You know, we can probably get you out of this,” Logan ventured.

He watched Sabrina closely, awaiting a reaction. Glancing in the direction of the bar, she appeared not to have even heard. “In some ways, the change will be not bad for me,” she said. “At Regina Elena, they do very good work also. Serious oncology.”

“It’s me they want to stick it to,” he pressed. “Stillman, even Larsen—if I take full responsibility for this thing, they’ll probably let you stay.”

She looked across the table, wide-eyed. “Why? Why would I wish to pretend I did not do what I did? Why would I want to stay?”

Logan realized, too late, he’d underestimated her. He had been certain, at the very least, she would find the gesture touching. Instead, she remained as frustratingly levelheaded as he, at that moment, was veering toward self-pity.

The worst of it—the part neither of them wanted to discuss, but which Logan’s proposal had partly been designed to address—was that they’d no longer have each other. The ACF had always been, literally, their common ground. Stripped of her standing at the Foundation, for Sabrina there was not even the possibility of work at a comparable level outside of Italy.

They would be an ocean apart.

Logan took a sip of his vodka martini; the first time in a year he’d ordered anything stronger than wine. “I don’t know,” he said, “it seemed like the right thing to say.”

“No, it was not the right thing.” She reached a hand across the table. “But I understand. Grazie.”

He could see that already, on some level, she was pulling away in self-protection. Probably he should do the same.

“At least at Regina Elena, they make me feel I am welcome,” she said. “Maybe at home we don’t have all the resources you have here, but what counts most is people.”

“When do they want you?”

“They say at the end of October. But I must go sooner, I think.” She momentarily averted her eyes. “The faster to leave, the better.”

“You’re right.”

“And you, Logan?”

He shrugged. “Don’t know yet.”

“You cannot go back to Claremont?”

“Not a chance. You ever hear the expression ‘Out of the frying pan, into the fire’?” He paused. “I’m thinking I might go home for a little while and mull things over.”

“To Decatur?” she asked, surprised. “Just for a week or two. Get organized, sort out my options.”

“I see.” She sipped her beer. “Your father will welcome you?”

“Who knows? But they say home is the place that, when you go there, they’ve got to take you in.”

“What I mean—he’ll understand when you tell what has happened here?”

“Well, it would definitely be better if I were going under other circumstances.” He looked at her tenderly. “And with you.”

Instantly, her reserve melted away. She gave his hand a tender squeeze. “One day, Logan. I promise.”

Logan headed out of town the same morning Sabrina flew out of Dulles for Rome. The trip to Decatur can be made in as little as ten hours, but he didn’t press it. He spent the night in a motel, then decided to stop in Chicago for a leisurely lunch. On the phone he’d been vague with his father. He was, he said, planning to take “a hiatus” from his job at the ACF. Would it be okay if he stopped by Decatur for, say, eight or ten days?

He pulled up before the familiar gray clapboard house late afternoon the day after he’d left. Five minutes later, he was still sitting in the car, staring at the house, when the front door swung open and his father came ambling toward him.

It had been almost three years since Logan had laid eyes on him, and he was struck by how much he’d aged. Though he was still rail thin, at close to seventy his long face was deeply furrowed and his unkempt hair had gone completely white.

“Well, you gonna get out, or what?”

“Hi, Dad,” he said, emerging. “Great to see you too.”

“Don’t get smart with me. Is that what they teach you at those places?”

“Actually, yes. You need it in self-defense.”

“I’ll bet you do, I’ll just bet you do.”

On his previous visit home, Logan might’ve laughed. Utterly unconscious of his own behavior, his father never failed to condemn the mean-spiritedness and authoritarianism he saw in others. The difference was that now the older man’s take on the world—that invariably it is the ruthless and amoral who succeed—was no longer so easy to dismiss out of hand.

“Yeah. Well, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to get away from that place. At least for a while.”

“So when you planning to go back?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you going back?”

He hesitated. “No.”

There it was. Logan waited for the inevitable reaction; and, sure enough, the look that attached itself to the older man’s face was the one he’d learned in earliest boyhood, disappointment mingling with scorn. “Great, just great! What the hell happened?”

“Maybe I can sit down first? Say hello to Mom?”

“You got fired, didn’t you? Why the hell didn’t you go into private practice like I told you?”

In spite of himself—he’d sworn he wouldn’t be drawn into something like this—Logan felt his entire body tensing. “It’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“It always is.”

“Look, I’m pretty tired.”

His father snorted. “What’d you do, insult some muckety-muck? Or just screw up?”

The question was actually a comment, but this time Logan didn’t let it pass. “I didn’t do anything wrong at all, Dad.”

His father studied him a moment. “Well, c’mon in and give us the bloody details. I guess it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference now.”

Billed by his mother as a welcome-home party, dinner that evening quickly degenerated into an even sharper reminder of why, all those years ago, Logan had been so anxious to get away.

“I’m not touching that,” announced the fourth family member at the table, his older sister Cathy, as soon as the main course appeared. “You know perfectly well I don’t eat meat.”

“Oh, darling, I really didn’t know that included fowl,” fretted his mother, the peacemaker. “Duck is Danny’s favorite. Couldn’t you this once make an exception?”

“No, mother, no exceptions. This isn’t a game, it’s my body we’re talking about.”

“Well, that’s the stupidest damn thing I ever heard!” snorted her father.

“C’mon, Dad, it’s not as if it’s news. Cathy’s been a vegetarian for ten years,” said Logan.

“Daniel, I prefer to be called Catherine now.”

If, as a psychologist would doubtless observe, both the Logan children were living their lives largely in reaction to their father, Cathy’s rebellion was probably the more far reaching, an ongoing battle against every attitude and value imposed upon her in that home. Where Logan shared his father’s vast respect for traditional learning, Cathy was open to every crackpot notion that came down the pike; where he had always drawn sustenance from the larger world, she was intensely inner directed. She ran a shop that sold locally handmade artifacts. For friends, she chose aging, over-the-hill veterans of the Age of Aquarius. “Pea brains,” her father called them.

And yet, in at least one key respect, she was more like the older man than Logan could ever imagine being, for she was as intractable, and every bit as opinionated. It could not have been coincidence that she’d remained so close to home, or that, for all the battling, she stopped by to see their parents at least a couple of times a week.

“Well, Catherine,” replied Logan, wondering again how he’d let himself be drawn into this, “I suppose I should insist that you call me Dr. Logan.”

“Frankly,” she said coolly, “I don’t know how anyone who professes to know about the human body could put that poison into himself.”

“We’re all gonna die anyway,” observed their father.

“Listen, Catherine,” said Logan, “there is absolutely no data to support this thesis of yours that people will drop dead from occasionally eating meat. None. Human physiology is a lot more complicated than that.”

“I question the validity of that statement,” she sneered.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“All your alleged data is collected by people whose minds are already made up. Doctors are just in cahoots with the drug companies and you know it.”

Their father laughed. “She’s got you there.”

“What, you’re opposed to drugs too?”

“Absolutely. My friend Lucy had breast cancer and they gave her chemotherapy. After every treatment she vomited for hours, and her hair started to fall out. Do you call that natural?”

This was a ludicrous conversation; the equivalent of a big-league ballplayer trying to explain the fine points of sliding technique to someone who doesn’t know where the bases are. “I happen to know something about breast cancer,” he said. “What would you suggest as an alternative?”

“Native Americans use yucca plants.”

“Oh, yes? And do you have any data on their cure rate?”

“Catherine made me some yucca plant tea for my arthritis,” cut in their mother. “I found it very helpful.”

Their father held up his hand to indicate this phase of the conversation was over, a peremptory gesture Logan had seen a thousand times before. “So,” he said, turning to his son, “I want to hear about your plans.”

Logan blanched; he needed time to prepare for this. “I have a number of options,” he equivocated.

“What?”

“Well, I do have one offer.”

“Where’s that?”

“New York City.”

His father looked mildly interested. “In a private practice? With a hospital?”

In fact, the offer wasn’t quite firm—and it was from neither a private practice nor a hospital. Among the first people he’d called after the ax fell was his friend Ruben Perez. Perez was now working part-time at a small start-up company in lower Manhattan, a research lab involved in AIDS drug delivery systems—and he was pretty sure the guy in charge could use someone with Logan’s credentials.

The job held minimal interest or prestige, and the pay would not be high. Logan would do almost anything to avoid taking it. “I don’t want to get into that now. As I say, I want to do some asking around. I plan to make calls all next week.” He turned to his father. “Don’t worry, I’ll reimburse you for the phone bill.”

“I’m not worried, I know you will.”

“I don’t see how you can even begin to defend doctors,” said Cathy sharply, “after what they’ve done to you.”

“That’s not fair, Catherine. It’s really not.”

In the silence that followed, Logan poured himself a second glass of wine.