"Can I help you?"
He stood there. He had not known, until he came up the stairs, that he was going to come up the stairs. He did not know now what he wanted to say to her. He thought of Lucia saying, She put her hand over her mouth.
"I was wondering," he said, "if you could tell me where somebody would send an appeal. For a park exclusion. A trespass warning. There's an address on the back of the form but I don't — I want to make sure it's current. Before I give it to someone."
Ms. Huang looked at him for a long moment. Something in her face changed, very slightly. He did not know whether she recognized him or only recognized the question.
"I can look that up for you," she said. "Have a seat. It may take a minute. The city reorganized the attorney's office last spring and nobody updated the forms."
"Nobody reads the back," Lloyd said.
"Somebody does," said Ms. Huang, and turned to her computer.
He sat in a wooden chair beside the information desk with A Wrinkle in Time on his knee and waited while she searched. Through the tall window across the room he could see a table with four chairs, and beyond it the river, gray and slow and wide, and the long steel span of the Kessick Street bridge, and under the near end of it, small with distance, the blue and green tarps of the camp that Brockman had been trying to clear since June.
That night, on the balcony of his apartment on the east side, which he had not stood on since the previous spring, he sat in a folding chair in his sweater with a beer he did not drink and his reading glasses on, and opened the book. It was a dark and stormy night, it began, which made him laugh out loud, alone, in the cold, because it was the oldest joke there was and he had not expected a children's book to be in on it. He read eleven pages. Then he took out his phone and opened the thread with his son, and looked at the photograph of the blue medallion in the palm of Andy's hand, and began to type.
He typed for a long time. He deleted most of it. What he sent, finally, at nine-forty at night, was this:
I said the wrong thing at the hospital. I said it in your grandfather's voice and I've been ashamed of it for two years and never said so. I'm sorry. I am proud of you and I don't know how to say it right so I'm just saying it. Also I'm reading a book. It's a kids' book about a girl looking for her father. I'll tell you about it if you ever want to hear.