“It was very polite,” he says.
I laugh again, the heaviness easing just enough.
Then Mark looks back at the fire.
“Only place I ever hid it was the army.”
I glance at him. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
There is no drama in the way he says it.
Just fact.
“What was that like?”
He shifts one shoulder against the headboard. “Fine at first. Until it wasn’t.”
I wait.
“You learn quickly what fits and what doesn’t. Easier not to offer up the parts that complicate things.”
That lands too neatly.
“And eventually?”
“I got tired of editing myself down,” he says.
Edit.
I know that feeling.
“So you left.”
“Yeah. Used what I knew. Engineering. Started building parts, then bigger things, then companies.”
He says it like he is discussing weather.
I study him.
“That explains the not-a-cottage.”
His mouth twitches.
“What about you? How does someone become an editor?”
“Accidentally,” I say. “I had a brief tragic period where I thought I was going to be a poet.”
He turns towards me. “Yeah?”
“There is, somewhere in the world, a notebook containing poems dedicated to the Backstreet Boys.”
He laughs.
I point at him. “Do not.”
“I’d pay to read those.”
