On stranger days, his father called him "sir."
Not confused — polite. The nurses logged it as disorientation, but Theo had started to suspect something more specific. On the days when his father didn't recognize him, the old man talked freely. He complained about the food with actual adjectives. He described his late wife's laugh as "operational" and then laughed at his own word. He told Theo — sir — that his son visited too often and always looked like he was taking notes.
"Taking notes?" Theo had said.
"Mental notes. You can see him filing things away for later. It's exhausting to be around."
Theo started introducing himself as James. His middle name, technically true. On James days, his father told him about a fishing trip in 1974 where nothing happened for six hours and then a heron landed on the bow and looked at him "like a clerk reviewing a form."
On Theo days, his father asked if he'd eaten, if the drive was long, if work was going well. The answers didn't matter. The questions were the visit.
The nurses thought the James days were bad days. Theo started scheduling around them. Tuesdays and Fridays — his father's stranger days ran in a loose pattern that the staff hadn't mapped because they weren't looking for periodicity in someone they'd already filed under decline.
For three months, Theo visited as James. He heard about the apartment his father had kept in the city before getting married — a detail Theo had never known. He heard that his father had once considered leaving. Not his wife. The country. He'd applied for a position in Munich and been accepted and then not gone, and the not-going had been, his father said, "the decision that swallowed all the others."
On a Tuesday in March, his father looked up from his lunch and said, "You can stop using your middle name, Theodore. I know who you are."
Theo set his coffee down.
"I've known every time," his father said. He pushed a piece of potato across the plate with the back of his fork. "Your mother used to say I was better with strangers. She was right. So were you."
"Dad —"
"Don't." The fork stopped. "I'm not upset. I'm saying I preferred it too."
They sat with that for a while. Outside, a groundskeeper was edging the lawn in a line so straight it looked corrective.
"The fishing story," Theo said. "The heron."
"All true."
"Munich."
"Also true. I couldn't have told my son." He picked up the fork again. "A stranger, though. A stranger you can tell anything. It's the only honest relationship there is."
Theo visited on Thursday — an off day, outside the pattern. His father called him sir, offered him a chair, and told him about a time he'd gotten lost in a department store as a child and hadn't been scared at all. He'd been relieved.
Theo took notes. Mental ones. He couldn't help it.
But he'd stopped filing them.