The Latecomer

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

When the world is tipping beneath you and you are tumbling even when you are sitting, even when you are sleeping (especially when you are sleeping), any place is the same as any other place. All this, like every other private thing, he would tell only one person, who would one day tell us.

all. This child who was not her son Lewyn; his mother, that fleeing

woman, was Stella Western, and his father was our father, Salo Oppenheimer.

“But what does namaste actually mean? It means: I bow to the divine light within you and you bow to the divine light within me.

But she was fourteen months old and would have no memory of this day, or the next, no matter how significant they would appear in hindsight.

“If you have to ask permission to ask me a question, it’s probably not about the weather.”