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The two walked toward town. As darkness fell, Paul rented a motel room in town with cash. Two double beds. He invited his father to spend the night in his room and was surprised when he agreed. A night in a warm bed or a night in a cold lean-to in the forest? Not a tough choice.

The room smelled stuffy, as if it hadn’t been used for a while. The beds were covered in worn burgundy coverlets. An old TV set, a telephone, a Keurig coffee maker. The place wasn’t seedy, but it was tired. Paul plugged his laptop into an outlet above the counter that ran around the perimeter of half the room. He turned on the antique Comfort-Aire air conditioner/heater, switched it to Heat, and it rattled to life.

His father, who’d always objected to modern conveniences, went over and shut the thing off.

Paul looked over. He thought, Fuck you. I paid for this room; you don’t get to dictate the terms . But instead of flaring up, he said gently, “Hey, Pop, I know you don’t like these things, but I’m in physical distress, and I need the comfort right now, and I’m going to turn this back on.”

His father said, “You bet. Okay, let me see this thumb drive.”

From his pocket, Paul drew the flash drive and inserted it into his laptop.

The screen filled with gibberish, as it had the last time he tried it, years before.

His father looked at the screen for a long time.

“Well, your hunch is right. This is indeed encrypted. But how old is this thing?”

“This flash drive is new. But I copied it from an old one, five years ago, and it had been in storage before that. Who knows how long it was there.”

“That explains it . . . This code uses an old version of the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, one that contains an unintentional backdoor.”

“In English, please?”

“It’s encrypted; lucky for us, the encryption was cracked some years ago. Thanks to the leak of NSA hacking tools. As I’m constantly telling you, think of how much better off we’d all be if the NSA didn’t exist. All these government intelligence agencies—”

“ Constantly telling me? I haven’t seen you in almost twenty years!”

“Well, I used to—only, you never listened.”

Paul stared at him, infuriated and maddened, all the old feelings returning. He shook his head, sighed with frustration.

“It’s probably hackable using EternalBlue,” his father said.

“Which is?”

“A hacking tool created by the NSA. Leaked by the Shadow Brokers, an infamous group of hackers, seven or eight years ago. The people’s crowbar, they call it.”

“Does that mean you can decrypt this?”

“With the right software and a better computer than this, I could. And my computer science skills are rusty and way out of date.”

“So now what?”

“A student of mine from Caltech teaches at CMU.”

“Carnegie Mellon?”

“Right. He’s brilliant. A genius of mathematical cryptography.”

“That’s codes, right?”

His father gave a skyward glance, nearly rolled his eyes. His standard response to something he considered dopey. “Uh, do you have one of those portable phones?”

*

They spent the night in the seedy motel, each of them exhausted. Paul wondered if he was spending his last night in relative comfort. The next morning, they picked up take-out coffee at a diner and hit the road. It was three and a half hours by car to Pittsburgh, via the PA 28, a boring drive, and for a long time they drove in silence.

Paul found himself thinking that there was something very American about what his father had become. The American isolato had a lot of company, from Walden Pond to the Westerns. Difficult men intoxicated by their own sense of integrity, cuddly as porcupines and supreme in self-reliance. Americans have always loved the archetype, whether frontiersman or fugitive or Jeremiah Johnson–style mountain man. Easy to heroize. But self-reliance could be self-centeredness, too. A retreat from the ties meant to bind. It took a toll on the people you were supposed to love and nurture. The creed hardened your skin but shrank your soul.

After half an hour, increasingly aware of the tense silence between the two of them, Paul said, “Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

“Well, for taking out the bullet.”

“Haven’t had to do that since Vietnam.”

“Huh.”

“Coulda been a lot worse. Bullet coulda struck an artery. You woulda bled out.” He shook his head. “Gunshot wounds are bad, especially if you’re shot in the thorax.”

Another long silence. Finally, Paul said quietly, “I just wish you’d shown Mom this level of care.” The words had just come out of him.

A long pause. “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“You didn’t want to support Big Medicine, or whatever you called it. So you let her die.” Paul’s heart was hammering rapidly. It had come out, and he hadn’t meant it to.

“Is that what you think?”

Paul didn’t reply.

“Your mother went in and got checked out, and they told her it was inoperable and she had ten months to live. So she refused to take any medication. I argued with her, but that was totally her call. Her decision.”

Paul was stunned into silence.

“She didn’t want you to know,” his father went on.

“Why—why not?”

“She didn’t want you to know that she was refusing medical care, because she thought you’d try to talk her out of it.”

“And she refused even palliative care, too?”

“Everything.”

Dumbfounded, Paul said, “And—why didn’t you ever tell me any of this?”

“Would you have listened?” Stan said.

A long silence. Paul didn’t know what to say. Yes, he would have tried to talk her out of it. Guilty as charged. His father, not exactly the most psychological of men, was probably equally hamstrung.

He wondered why his father had never tried to establish a détente.

Then again, neither had he.

“You have a point,” Paul said. “I wish—”

What to say? I wish you’d told me this twenty years ago? I wouldn’t have cut you off for all these years? But that was too painful to admit.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry,” Paul said. He left it vague, unspecified. Sorry for what? He didn’t say.

His father didn’t ask.

Stanley put his hand on top of Paul’s knee. “Water under the bridge,” he said.