He lifted his face and looked over in my direction and cast something that might almost have been the flicker of a complicit smile, and then looked down at the box he held in his hand before setting it upon the refurbished desk, saying nothing. It meant, Let it be our secret. So we had a secret. But the real secret was not that I had gone to see him almost every afternoon but that he sensed I didn’t want my parents to know. This was the secret. It never occurred to me to wonder why he hadn’t brought up my visits, or why he hadn’t acknowledged my role in polishing the box.
