“You have five minutes,” I told him.
He nodded.
“Okay.”
“Why did you leave?”
He looked down.
“I panicked. I couldn’t sit there watching things get worse while everyone told us to accept it.”
“So you abandoned us?”
“No. I started looking for something everyone might have overlooked.”
“You could have called.”
“I did. Hundreds of times. You blocked me. Every time I called from another number, you blocked that one, too.”
“Where were you?”
“Wherever I could find work. Arizona. Nevada. Germany, for a while.”
“And all that time?”
“I kept looking.”
He crouched down and pulled a battered folder from his bag.
“What’s that?”
Instead of answering, he slid it across the table.
I opened it.
Boston. Toronto. Zurich. Berlin.
Emails.
Applications.
Rejections.
Names of doctors I recognized and others I didn’t.
The oldest document was dated less than six months after he had left us.
