He’d always been good at preparing himself for not getting what he wanted, and in the grand scheme of things this was not a hard blow. He was fine with who he was and what he had done. He could now safely imagine what he would have done had he won the Nobel Prize. He would have brought Amos’s wife and children with him. He would have appended to his Nobel lecture his eulogy of Amos. He would have carried Amos to Stockholm with him. He would have done for Amos what Amos could never do for him.
