He asked, on a Tuesday in early summer, whether I would like to walk with him.
This sounds simple. It was not entirely simple.
We had walked together before, during the investigation — brief walks in the household garden, or the occasional necessity of moving between parts of the city together when the work required it. These walks had had a purpose beyond themselves. The walk he was proposing now was different: it was a walk with no destination, on a Tuesday afternoon, in the city, because the afternoon was fine and the weather was the particular warm and clear weather of early summer in this part of the country, and because he wanted to walk and wanted to walk with me.
I understood all of this in the way I understood most things about him now — by reading the quality of the offer rather than its surface content. He was not a person who made idle invitations. When he asked whether I would like to walk with him, he was asking something more than the question's literal content.
