A Conspiracy of Fate

September 7th, 2000

The patient had booked a double session at the end of the day under what Dr. Barnes believed could only be an assumed name, and he was paying out of pocket. The doctor was intrigued – he was ripe for a new and interesting story. The sleepy, upper-class suburb in which he worked had provided plenty of clients, but he’d long past become disinterested in their repetitious stories of infidelities and business failings and various calamities with the bookie. The good doctor never allowed this boredom to manifest in his expression or deportment, however; he always listened patiently to his clients, faithfully dispensing the advice which corresponded to their complaints. However, in his mind, they’d begun to embody to him the Willa Cather quote: There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. Each of his clients’ narratives had minor deviations from the others, naturally, but fundamentally, they were all the same. And of course, his clients were unaware of this . . . as would he be, if he were seeking counsel. In times of crisis, each individual feels alone with his situation, alone with his emotions. Such was the human condition.

Seated at his desk and going over the history of a troubled marriage he’d been counseling for the previous three months, Dr. Barnes heard the front door open and shut as someone stepped into the small front entry. He put the pages away in his desk and stood to greet his new patient.  As he walked into the small, red brick, waxed-wood foyer, Dr. Barnes, trained to the skill, took in the young man’s characteristics in a flash: tall, wasp-waisted, around twenty-two, sandy hair. The slump of his shoulders and the way he hung his head suggested melancholy; the black bags beneath his unsettled green eyes expressed chronic insomnia. He had an emaciated look about him as well, as though he hadn’t been eating properly. Heroin? the doctor wondered. The young man was wearing short sleeves and carrying a hoodie; Dr. Barnes observed that his veins were clean.

“Good afternoon, I’m glad you made it,” he said cheerfully, reaching to shake. “How’re you?” The boy looked at him so dolefully that the doctor was moved. He dropped his hand with a furrowed brow. “My office is just here,” he said, beckoning to the open door off the foyer. “Why don’t you go inside and make yourself comfortable? I’m going to go get myself a coffee from the kitchen. May I tempt you?”

“Yes, coffee, black, thank you.” The young man’s voice was low and gravelly.

Dr. Barnes went to the kitchen and poured two cups., then returned to the office and offered one of the mugs to the patient on the couch before settling across from him in the comfortable saddle-brown leather chair his wife had bought him last year for Christmas. Both men took a drink from their respective bone-colored mugs and looked at one another.

“May I ask a question?” Dr. Barnes said.

There came no reply.

“Your name isn’t really John Smith, is it?”

“No.” There was no defiance or belligerence in his tone. Weariness, if anything. “But I don’t want to be associated with the story I’m about to tell you, and short of wearing a mask to this session, I could see no other way to go about this.”

“Surely you know that any information you divulge to me today is protected by doctor/patient privilege? The same as at your physician’s office.”

“I don’t care about that. I don’t want you to know who I am.” His face twisted as though he had an internal pain. “All I know is, I can’t carry on like this. Please. Will you see me?” With a sense of wild desperation, he shot up and sprang towards the desk, reaching for his back pocket. “Here, I can give you money . . . . ”

“Stop.” Alarmed, Dr. Barnes put his own hand over John’s left one, flat against the top of the desk. “Just stop. Yes, of course I will see you.”

Relieved, the young man returned to the navy studded settee and sank down against the plush cushions. He covered his face with trembling hands and remained like that for a moment, then again reached for his mug, which he’d set in front of him on the tiled coffee table. Dr. Barnes watched him.

“How’ve you been sleeping, eating?” he asked casually. John scoffed.

“Not at all. Just in snatches. Food is . . . I’m not interested.”

“Do you work?”

“I graduated from college a few months ago. My girlfriend and I travelled to Europe for a month and a half after. I’ve only been home about two months. I’ve just been sorta . . . at my dad’s shop while I drift. I can’t think about work now.”

“Why not?”

“It’s my girlfriend – Caitlin. Cat. We’ve been dating two years and she wants to get married.”

“And you have reservations?”

“No,” he answered with real anguish. “I have none. She is undoubtedly the great love of my life.”

Dr. Barnes said nothing, waiting for clarification. John ran a hand through his hair, agitated, and took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he began. “Let me start from the very beginning, five years ago, when I was in high school.” He looked out the window vapidly and shook his head with a grim mouth. “See, I didn’t meet Cat until I was a sophomore in college, but when I was seventeen, I dated this girl named Chloë . . . she was the first girl I ever loved. We’d only been together about a year, but I’d known her my whole life. We grew up together in the sticks, where everyone knows everyone else. And then there are a couple other little towns, you know, in the vicinity.” He made a vague encompassing motion with his hand. “But they aren’t super nearby, and the only time we really ever saw those kids was at like, sports.” He frowned. “I mean, I guess, yeah, a couple people had family that lived in those towns, but I didn’t. Mostly you didn’t know any of those kids at the other schools.” His tone grew hostile as he looked at Dr. Barnes sharply. “Okay? Almost no one knew who they were.”

“Okay,” Dr. Barnes replied, quietly making a note.

John sighed. “But then it was May, and the seniors were graduating. My buddy Dave had heard about a huge party in one of the nearby towns I was just telling you about . . . it was literally supposed to be a barn-buster, parents out of town, kegs, rowdy teenagers converging from a fifty-mile radius, the whole bit. ‘It’s going to be legendary,’ Dave promised me. ‘It’s gonna be just like something from a movie!’ Chloë and I, we’d been lying shoulder to shoulder in the outfield, drinking in the sun, eating sour apple Jolly Ranchers and listening to Aerosmith on a portable stereo. She’d just laughed, and Mike was stunned. ‘You’re not going to go?’ he asked her. She’d told him no, of course not. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Her father, he’s the town minister. He’d been cool with me dating her, having baptized me and everything, but raging unsupervised parties, not so much.” John stopped to take a drink of his coffee. “Anyway, I had wanted to go. Like I said, I was seventeen, I wanted to party, I wanted to have fun. I was young, it seemed only natural that I’d want to be young, right?” Dr. Barnes began to agree, but John waved him off bitterly. “At least that’s what I told myself. And so, with assistance from Dave, I began a deliberate campaign to wear Chloë down.” Each word was calculated. “‘Everyone will be there, even the squares like you’, had been the upshot of it. And it’d worked.” He paused, cogitating. “I’m still not sure how we accomplished it, because she was like, a really good girl. Straight as an arrow. A good Christian, a rule-following girl-next-door, a good daughter, a good friend, a good student . . . just good, you know what I mean?”

Dr. Barnes nodded and did not interrupt. People wanted to tell their stories, and it had been his experience that it was best to let them tell it in their own way and in their own time without peppering them with too many questions. He felt he was able to ascertain more through following than leading.

“I loved her,” John said dreamily, and his eyes – shades of pear and emerald, flecked with threads of gold – were far away. He closed them. “I’d never loved anyone before her, and so she’d made me feel things I’d never felt, wonderful things, like these show-stopping, technicolored mortar fireworks popping off inside me.” He pantomimed explosions with his hands. “And I’d known no one else in the history of the world had ever felt like we did about one other, except maybe Romeo and Juliet – fiction – or like, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.”

Dr. Barnes smiled. “‘Lovestruck’, I believe they call that condition.”

“I loved her,” John went on in the same pensive voice. “I would’ve married her, I think. She was so beautiful, so smart.” He came back to focus and looked at the doctor. “We would’ve been those people, you know, those small town, high school sweethearts who get married and live happily ever after.” A soft smile touched his mouth. “And that would’ve suited me down to the ground. I didn’t see anything else for myself beyond her, beyond that little town . . . . ” The smile vanished. “And that’s part of the problem now, too, with my father . . . he’s like” – and then, altering his voice to a fair impersonation of Foghorn Leghorn, John said, “‘I say, I say, boy, now ya got this fancy, expensive education, so whatcha gonna do about it?’” He sighed. “But the problem is, I never saw myself as a College Boy. That’s not what I wanted, and it’s definitely not part of my own self-image. The only reason I went at all was because of what happened with Chloë that summer.” He shook his head bitterly. “It was the longest fucking summer of my life, and it started the night of that party.” Dr. Barnes watched empathetically as the memories flooded back to John like an objectionable movie he was being forced to watch; World War II crimes, open-heart surgeries, wildfires raging out of control. He inhaled deeply, raking a hand over his troubled face.

“So,” he began, “I’d worn her down. She’d agreed to go. Our plan involved her sneaking out through her bedroom window onto this pergola/carport thing they have, where I would be waiting for her in the shadows. We would then walk to my car, which would be parked nearby. We would go to the party, where we would drink, we would smoke, and we would dance. We would sneak her back at dawn, changed to a woman in this perfect, intoxicating night wherein she’d surrendered her virtue to me.” He rolled his eyes. “We’d felt clever and daring. This was a level of deception heretofore unimaginable; I’d been trying to sleep with Chloë all year long, so I figured this was definitely going to be the highlight of my summer.” His face turned brittle, as though angry at himself for having ever had such a ridiculous notion, and he cleared his throat before continuing.

“On the morning of the party, I watched the Farm Report over breakfast, and it said sunset would be around 8:45. The drive from the minister’s place to the other town is maybe an hour, an hour and fifteen minutes. Chloë and I had to wait for cover of darkness, and then the whole thing was a debacle – cat burglary definitely hadn’t been in her future – but we somehow managed to get out of there without disturbing anybody.” He shook his head, reflective. “And I remember, as we walked through the rye towards my car, she looked back a little nervously at her house, doubtfully; but then she took my hand, and it was so soft in mine, and she’d looked at me with a gentle smile, and kissed me softly. ‘We’ll remember this night always,’ she’d said.” John’s expression was despondent. “I’ll always remember that; it haunts me. ‘We’ll remember this night always.’ Indeed, Chloë, how right you were. And so we got in the car. And then we were fucked.”

Dr. Barnes could not deny that his intrigue was magnified. This story was not of the same ilk as those generally presented to him day in and day out. He made a couple of notes on his legal pad. “What happened?” he asked in a neutral voice. Secretly, he was imagining that they’d run someone over.

“You’re thinking I ran someone over,” John accused with narrowed eyes. “That I killed them and left them there.”

“John, I’m not thinking anything. I’m only here to listen, not to judge. I’d be in the wrong line of work if that were my thing.” Dr. Barnes jotted down a quick note. “Were you in a car accident?”

“What are you writing.” John’s tone was both flat and hard, and his eyes were flashing. “That I killed someone and left them there? That I said that? Why are you writing anything? There’s no point in taking notes – I’m not going to become like, a regular client. I had to scrape just to come up with enough dough for this session.” Dr. Barnes backed off.

“Habit, I guess. Would it make you more comfortable if I set it aside?”

“Yes.” John’s jaw was set. Dr. Barnes laid the pad on his desk.

“Okay. Please, continue.”

There was a long, bleak silence. John took another drink from his mug, and Dr. Barnes noticed that his hands were still shaking. Finally, without preamble, he said, “So, we’d been driving, driving, driving, and then there’d been a turnout to this little eddy off the river. Chloë wanted to stop. Fine. We got out, and I had a blanket in my truck, and we spread it out in the bed and stargazed. I’d had a flask with me, too – I’d been seventeen, my motives had been far from altruistic – and we drank off that. Not enough to impair us, we hadn’t been hammered or anything, but . . . it’s just important to remember.

“I don’t know how long we laid out there. Awhile. Then it’d been like, ‘Shit, we better get going,’ and so we’d gotten back in the truck and started on our way. It’d been late, maybe 11:30, 11:45, and we had about twenty miles to go. Chloë had said, ‘Okay, so we’ll get there about midnight, find Dave and Benny’ – another friend of ours – ‘and hang out for an hour or two. Then we’ll go back to the river . . . where it’s silent . . . and we’re alone . . . . ’ She’d put her hand on my thigh brazenly and kissed my earlobe, and I’d told her to cut it out, that she was going to make me wreck, because it tickled.

And I remember she’d rolled down the window, and the air had rushed in like birds to the wing, because I’d been going pretty fast, like sixty, sixty-five miles an hour on this two-lane road. Her hair – she had this amazing thick, really long black hair – had been moving around her sensuously. She’d never looked more flushed, exhilarated, and alive.

“‘I can’t believe I’m doing this!’ she’d shouted, and she put her hand over her face.” John put his own hand over his face and peeked out between his fingers as she had done. “We were laughing. Our hearts were full. I’d asked her if she was enjoying herself, and she’d told me she was, and I said I was a terrible influence and a very bad seed.

“In that same moment – in the middle of that perfect ‘life is beautiful!’ moment – I was blinded in the rearview by a set of high beams from the vehicle behind me.” John squinted as though blinded now. “He’d appeared from absolutely nowhere. He was still at a distance, but the problem was that the road was a straight shot in the portion between us. The portion I was coming upon was switchback.” He pantomimed with his fingers. “So it’d been like, ‘Great, now I’ve got to drive through this well-black darkness down this scary-ass road that I don’t even know – I mean, Jesus, I’d only had my license a year – and at the same time, be blinded by the high beams of this prick behind me? Come on!’ I tried pumping my brakes a few times like, ‘Hello! Hi! I’m here! See me? Can you maybe do something about the lights?’ But that proved to be a really bad idea, because it only narrowed the distance between us, and this guy was coming at speed.

“Like I said, this road is a two-way out in the middle of nowhere, and at this point it was beginning to switch around the hill. I had no choice but to slow down. Chloë was oblivious.” John rolled his eyes. “She’d put on The Strangeloves’ ‘I Want Candy’ and was hand-jiving to the music. Annoying as hell. It wasn’t until I waved her away and turned it off that she finally realized something was up. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. I pointed to the mirror and told her I wished that guy would turn off his brights, but it was fine, we were switching now and I’d just stay ahead of him. But even when I said it, I didn’t believe it, and I was looking in the rearview every two seconds, freaking out, scaring Chloë – she’d noticed that I was gripping the steering wheel so hard that my knuckles had turned white. She’d turned around and looked behind us, and there wasn’t anything there. ‘Relax,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’”

He took a deep breath.

“Then, I’m not kidding you, it was like something from a horror movie. They suddenly appeared – I had by now deduced there were two of them in the car – and they’d been right on our part of the switch. And shifting gears! I heard the driver accelerating right up on my bumper. Chloë screamed. Hell, I screamed. ‘Go, go, go!’ she hollered. So I pressed on the gas. But I was in this clunky old Chevy, and she hadn’t been built for speed. The jerkwad behind me had a sleek, tony old Jag. I’m no gearhead but it was like, one of those little English jobs that’s always, always painted British Racing Green. Whatever. It was much, much faster than me, no doubt, which became obvious in about one second. Also made obvious was that he had the advantage in every field: speed, cornering, and most importantly, foresight. He clearly knew the road, knew every dip and turn like the back of his hand. He was a local. I was going at the very limit of what I thought I could safely drive while still being able to execute those turns, and he blared his horn and flashed his lights and rode my ass so closely that I sometimes couldn’t even see his lights. Truly, it was the stuff of nightmares. Chloë was screaming and crying hysterically, begging me to do something . . . this went on for miles around the hill. I was fucking terrified. I really thought we might die or get seriously hurt out there. Chloë was yelling at me to pull over, but . . . . ” John laughed angrily. “That hadn’t been easy. It’s the kind of road that doesn’t have a shoulder along large portions of it, and crossing the center line wasn’t a safe option, either; we couldn’t see far into oncoming traffic, because of the switching, and it was very dark.

“Finally we happened upon an access road, and I pulled in, seconds away from cardiac arrest. The Jag gunned it, blasting past. We sat in the car, badly shaken, trembling and trying to collect ourselves.” John shuddered at the memory. “That took awhile to accomplish, and we no longer felt much like going to the party . . . but at that point we’d been really close, so we figured, eh, may as well go tell Dave and Benny about our wild ride, and why we wanted to go home.” He grimaced. “So, after we’d regained our composure, we headed towards the party, talking about what an unbelievable asshole that guy was. We’d not gone half a mile – ” he shook his head in disbelief “ — not half a mile before Chloë said, ‘John, stop, stop, stop the car.’ I did, and she leapt out and went running down the road in the direction from which we’d come. I got out, too, and stared, thunderstruck, as she went over to the side of the road and gazed into the green-black depths beneath, where the pines and the ferns and the growth lie all twined amongst each other undisturbed. And even under the shroud of darkness and shadow, I was able to see the twisted guardrail pointing towards the sky.” He shuddered again as he looked at a fixed point on the wall and drew a shaky breath. “I understood instantly, of course – Chloë and I had stared at one another down the road for a long moment, and then I said ‘Oh, shit’ at the same moment she cried, ‘Turn the car around, bring it back, try to see if you can shine your headlights here.’ And so I had, and it’d been . . . . ” He pressed the heel of his hand to his eye and shook his head, not meeting the doctor’s gaze. “It’d been . . . there are no words. Just horrific. We were instantly scared out of our skins.” He took another ragged breath, and when he spoke again, his tone was low and husky. “The car had been upside down and sort of half-suspended among the trees.” He angled his hand almost unconsciously to show the degree, and then dropped it again into his lap.; when he next spoke, a slightly defensive tone colored the quality of his voice. “Because the guy had been being all machismo and gunned it past us, he’d been driving too fast when he’d needed to take the turn, and he’d skidded out.” He hesitated a moment, debating, and then he plowed ahead. “You’re not going to judge me for what I say next to you?”

“No. I promise.”

“Well, part of me had been like, ‘Jesus,’ but it’d also been like, ‘Dude, you made your own bed. Better you than us.’ And I know to a person who like, professionally cares about others, that probably sounds wrong, or mean, or horrible. It’s not fashionable or whatever. So maybe I’m officially a Bad Person.” He paused. “Am I officially a Bad Person? Is my soul stained forever?” The doctor was perplexed.

“Why would your soul be stained forever?”

“Because,” John answered tersely, “I was mad at the guy, and we’d been drinking, and we hadn’t wanted to deal with the cops, and neither one of us had been prepared to explain to the small town minister why I’d sneaked his only daughter out for a booze and sex-filled romp. Furthermore, we’d been just plain scared. So we left. Like, beat a hasty retreat. We could’ve driven another five, ten minutes and called the police from the party, from a pay phone, even, but we hadn’t. We drove home, an hour home, and we didn’t call anybody, and someone died.”

Dr. Barnes fixed a scrupulous, professional expression on his face. “I’m so sorry. That’s devastating.”

“It was on the news and in the papers for awhile,” John continued in a grey voice. “They had to use the Jaws of Life, the driver had been partially crushed, but hadn’t died straightaway . . . . ” His mouth flattened to a grim line at the thought. “His name had been Dylan Howard. He was from the same town as the party we were supposed to be going to, his stepfather owned a big farm over there. He’d been twenty one years old, and he’d had his sixteen year old stepsister in the car with him at the time of his jackassery. Luckily, she’d survived just fine, it’d been one of those.” John made a vague waving motion and swallowed a drink of his coffee.

“I kept waiting to feel bad,” he said, setting the mug back down and wiping his mouth with the back of his wrist. “I knew I should feel like, some sort of responsibility, or have remorse — it’s just good decorum. But every time I’d start to think those things, another voice inside me would shout, ‘Look, it wasn’t you who told him to drive like a fiend, was it? You’re not obliged to be a Good Samaritan to people who, only moments before, had been terrorizing you!’ And more often than not it was the second voice that won the day, so I hadn’t often been conflicted.

“But Chloë.” His expression turned somber, as did his tone. “Poor Chloë. She, too, had had two voices, but in her case, the former had been most compelling. Morality being a star feature of her life, she’d dissolved into a train wreck. She wanted to go to the police after it broke in the news, a ridiculous notion that’d taken forever to talk her out of . . . I ended up telling her I would’ve done it, if I’d thought it would’ve done any good at all – but what use would it have been to the police to know that we’d seen exactly what they’d seen? We hadn’t actually seen the crash itself, and investigators were probably well aware that speed was at play. There was a statement from the stepsister. We didn’t need to get involved. We needed to step back and forget that horrible night.” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Chloë tried to protest, but I shut her down; I told her that since I’d been the one who’d been driving, I was going to be the one who made all the decision, capisce? That was final.”

Dr. Barnes waited.

“Chloë couldn’t move on. Her heart was much, much softer than was mine. Over the summer, it ate away at her by acute degrees, until it changed her from a lovely, spirited girl to a pale ghost that barely spoke and never slept.” Sorrow creased his brow. “She’d been such a beautiful girl, but by summer’s end she’d looked so wasted that her parents were convinced she was on drugs. She wasn’t, not then . . . but I understand why they thought it, because she’d become angry, aloof, and unreachable, the way that drugs can do to a person. And no matter what I did, no matter what anyone had done, she just . . . . ” He trailed off, biting his lip. “She never came out of it. She became a shell of a woman. We broke up and I, with nothing better to do, left for college. It’d hurt, because I’d loved her, and it’d blackened my name around town – we’d been together awhile, and it’d read to others as though I’d been acting the part of the typical shit boyfriend, cutting and running in the midst of what was, to them, her inexplicable depression. But that wasn’t what it’d been about. Like I said, I’d have happily stayed, I’d have probably married her had it not been for that night.” He stopped abruptly, and there was a moment of silence before he exhaled shakily. “But it doesn’t do any good to think about what might’ve been, because that night did happen, and I wasn’t about to hang around and act like I was dead, too, just to keep Dylan Howard company, which, you know, appeared to be Chloë’s new gig. So, I left. I did it again. I got scared and I just . . . I took off.”

Dr. Barnes waited again, and John scrubbed at his face furiously.

“The last time I saw Chloë was over Christmas break my freshman year of college,” he said. “My parents aren’t wealthy people, but they’re deeply traditional and well-respected in our community, and they always host a huge, lavish holiday party; everyone in town is invited. I made sure I was home in time to attend, to please my mother. I’d had some anxiety about it, because I’d known the minister and maybe Chloë would be there to make it awkward, and of course they were. But after I’d gotten a look at her, none of my previous petty vanities about awkwardness had mattered, because man, she’d looked bad. Obviously on drugs, this time for real, track marks in her arms, sores on her face. I’d been so horrified that I’d followed my mother into the kitchen to gossip, and she’d whispered to me that Chloë had just quit school – she’d been a senior that year. I’d been so shocked that I dropped the plate of manicotti I was holding onto the floor. Chloë had formerly been in the National Honor Society.”

“Did you speak with her?” asked Dr. Barnes.

“Yes . . . . ” John winced. “It’d been difficult to approach her, but actually, she shot straight from the hip. She apologized for being there at all. She said she knew she made people uncomfortable and provoked either their pity or contempt; she said she was interested in neither. She said that she understood that she wasn’t the kind of person you’d want at your nice Christmas party. She said that she was only there because her parents were operating under the annoying pretense that she’d be cured by game nights and family dinners and gatherings like this one, and lots and lots of prayers.” The memory was painful, and tears rushed to his eyes; he dashed them away. “And then . . . and then she’d just walked away from me, and melted into the crowd.” There was another pause, another shaky drink from his mug before he could carry on.

“A couple weeks before Spring Break, I’d been working on stuff for finals in my room, and my phone rang.” His voice was low and black. “It’d been my mother. She told me, ‘Honey, sit down. Are you sitting down? We just got awful news: Chloë is dead. An overdose. They tried to save her with Narcan, but she’s gone.’” John eyes screwed tight, leaking as he recalled the moment. “I hadn’t even been able to say anything coherent, I just hung up the phone, trembling all over. I couldn’t take it in – the scope had been too inconceivable. And even though I couldn’t believe it, even though it seemed impossible, it’d also been like, ‘Okay, shit is getting real now.’” His face flushed crimson. “I mean, how much longer could I keep telling myself I didn’t have some incidental responsibility? One person was dead by my inaction, and another because . . . . ” He trailed off, trying to arrange his thoughts properly. “I mean, I don’t believe it was Chloë’s intention to overdose, I don’t. But I do think drugs were her means of escaping what had happened that night, and therefore her death is a consequence of my inaction.” He stirred in agitation. “Remember how I told you before that I’d kept waiting to feel that excruciating contrition, to feel that burning, agonizing remorse that had so consumed Chloë? Well, man, now I had it coming at me in spades. I remembered very well how it’d been me who’d worn Chloë down, how she hadn’t even wanted to go to the party, and now she was dead from her grief. The repentance that she’d felt for Dylan Howard was passed like a curse onto me in her death, so that now I felt that same magnitude of anguish and sorrow towards her.” He was highly disconcerted. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“No.”

John fumbled around in his hoodie pocket and produced a pack of Camels. Dr. Barnes offered him an ashtray and stood to open the window all the way.

“A year passed,” John went on, cupping his hand around the blue-orange flame from his yellow Bic lighter. “More than a year. I’d been doing just well enough in school that my dad wasn’t asking questions.” He exhaled towards the ceiling in a sinuous fog. “To keep busy in the evenings, I’d been in a billiards league, and a darts league, and I dated a lot. I couldn’t stand being alone, because that meant being alone with my thoughts. And then one day, a classmate said to me that she had my perfect match, a friend of hers named Caitlin Lewis.” He took a deep drag and, holding the smoke in his lungs, he stood and went to the window. “Caitlin was a waitress and a singer in a bar/sometimes professional backup singer,” he said as he exhaled. “My friend told me there was something similar about us, a kismet, the same kind of moody melancholy. You couldn’t see it all the time in Caitlin, she told me, but you could hear it in her music. So, I’d taken her number, because why not? I didn’t really care who I took on a date or two, as long as they weren’t mean, or stupid, or ugly.” John shrugged. “I called her a couple days later and we set up to meet at the college Commons that Friday.” He paused, reflecting, tapping the ash into his hand. “And I know it sounds silly when I say it now that I’m older, but I’d truly believed that after Chloë, I would never, ever find real happiness. I mean, it had really messed me up. My whole life was a huge fraud. With all the guileless girls I’d slept with, I just smiled, and pretended, and said the correct, formulaic thing, chasing a ghost I was imagining every time I closed my eyes – a  beautiful girl, forever sixteen, with the wind whipping through her dancing black hair.” He frowned. “It was getting pretty sick. Like, Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Annabel Lee’ style. Cat came into my life in the nick of time.”

“Tell me about her,” Dr. Barnes said. A half-smile touched John’s mouth.

“We met in the Commons that day, and instantly I’d known she was going to change things for the better. Instantly I’d known she was going to prove my previous perceptions about my life wrong somehow. She’s fun, and vibrant, and attractive in an edgy way, all cheekbones and lips, and that day, she’d been wearing this very chic garnet-red leather jacket. My first concern, actually, had been how was I going to snatch her up and pin her down, as she’s pretty much out of my league. She’s a year younger than me, and her father is well-to-do and lives in a large town nearby. Her mother passed away from cancer when she’d been in the sixth grade. And then a couple times she’d made mention of some ugly family secret; I wouldn’t have even remembered, except that she referenced it so rarely that this in and of itself made it noteworthy and interesting. She always left the details in oblivion, though, and I never pried.”

“How would you describe the condition of your relationship?” Dr. Barnes asked.

“It’s a very happy one. We’ve been together over two years and like one another’s families. Cat’s found increasing success as a backup singer. This is yet another one of the many moving parts involved in why I’m here today.” Dr. Barnes frowned.

“If you’ve been together for two years in a relationship she believes may soon culminate in marriage, don’t you find it strange she’s keeping secrets about her family from you?” John looked at him blankly. Dr. Barnes tried a different tact. “Let me pose it to you like this. If you had an ugly secret, wouldn’t you have told her by now?” The inexpressiveness filled with incredulousness.

“I do have an ugly secret. I’ve never told Cat about the car accident.” There was a long beat.

“I see. Does she know about Chloë?”

John nodded.

“So, she knows about Chloë, but not the circumstances that caused Chloë’s addiction.”

“Right. And so now it’s like, even if I wanted to tell her, I can’t say anything, because that’s the official line: ‘No One Knows’.” John stretched his hands away from each other as though displaying a headline. “I don’t want to disabuse anyone’s mind, I don’t want to be like, ‘Yeah, actually it’s because of this whole Dylan Howard thing’, and have people go digging up stuff better left alone. It’d just upset everyone in town. And I know it probably sounds like I’m just making a rationalization so I can run away from an unpleasant situation again, but honestly, I do think it’s best to just let it lie and not cause more grief for her poor family, whom I’ve known my whole life and care about very much.”

“Well, I think that’s a solid narrative if you decide to choose it,” Dr. Barnes offered supportively.

John shrugged, non-committal, and stared at his shoes, looking miserable. “Then last Christmas happened,” he continued. “Cat had been expecting a proposal, which hadn’t happened, and we had an explosive fight, the worst one ever. She flipped out and said, ‘Look, if this isn’t going anywhere, I want out.’ She’d been serious, make no mistake, and I couldn’t have that – I’d die without her. But I’d temporized. I said, ‘I have to graduate first.’ Then I graduated, and she sorta looked at me expectantly, and so I clapped my hands together and said, ‘Let’s go to Europe!’ You know. To distract her.” John sighed. “But now we’re home, and we’ve been home two months, and she’s about had it with being put off. She wants a commitment, in ink.” He took a drink of his coffee, inhaled sharply on his cigarette. “Then, to further complicate things, I’m not really working – we’re just renting a small, rundown loft in the shitty part of town, and I commute, when I do work – but she was just offered a full-time gig at a studio in New York as a backup singer. This is like, her dream, the first step on her path to being a front man, if it’s ever gonna happen for her. She wants to get married, and she wants me to follow her to New York, where there’s more opportunity for both of us. She’s framed it in such a way that if I refuse, it must be because I don’t love her enough.” He stubbed out his cigarette with small violence. There was a measured silence.

“Well,” Dr. Barnes said carefully, “looking in from the outside, I have to say that I fundamentally agree with her. Why do you still feel bound to remain? Might it have to do with specific unresolved feelings regarding Chloë?” John glared at him crossly.

“No,” he snapped. “Cat made me understand that I can’t blame myself for Chloë’s . . . . ” He bit his lip, averting his eyes. “And you know, it was the same logic, unassailable – I hadn’t been the one who’d put that needle in her arm, I never would’ve done that. Just like I’d told myself it hadn’t been me who’d been driving aggressively and scaring people for shits and giggles. That’s not my style, either. No, it’s not about Chloë, and it’s not because I don’t love Cat enough. I’d propose in a minute now that we’re home and she’s been offered this job, except . . . . ” He paused, his hands working together in knots. “I received some horrible, shocking news, you see, and I’ve been carrying it around inside me, and it’s destroying me like a wasting disease. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t think. It’s Chloë’s curse. It’s back, only worse, and it’s doing to me what it did to her. I’m scared.” His eyes were indeed glazed over with an animal fear as he looked at Dr. Barnes. “It’s why I came to see you today. I’m actually frightened.”

“But there’re no such thing as curses, John,” the doctor assured him with a crooked smile. “Bad luck, perhaps, but not curses. What was the news?” John exhaled from the bottom of his lungs, put his face in his hands, and leaned forward so that his forehead was almost touching his knees.

“Two months ago, Cat and I pulled into my parents’ driveway.” His voice was muffled and flat, like a recitation, like he’d been practicing. “We’d just gotten in from Europe, from the airport, and I’d felt like I’d just been on a three day bender. We’d been crammed into the worst seats on the plane for like, twelve hours, and I was wrecked, implacable thirst, bitching headache. Cat had been sitting in the passenger seat, and she was unusually quiet, kinda looking out the window vacantly. Something had obviously been on her mind, so I’d offered her a penny for her thoughts. She turned and said, ‘I guess you’re gonna be out here all the time now, seeing your parents and working for your dad and all.’ I’d sorta shrugged, and she said, ‘There’s something I’ve never told you, in all the times I’ve been out here to see your folks.’ I’d said, ‘Oh?’ And she’d said, ‘Yes. I actually used to live in a town about sixty miles from here, but we never, ever talk about it.’”

Dr. Barnes’ eyes widened as he stared at John, aghast. “No. Did she know Dylan Howard?”

John glanced up with a look of wonderment. “Worse. Oh my God, it all gets so much worse.” He drew an unsteady breath, and Dr. Barnes noticed that a fine sheen of perspiration had appeared on his forehead. “It’s like a conspiracy of fate,” he said dully. “An old invoice due to karma. Cat is Dylan’s stepsister. They’d never released her name in the newspaper because she’d been underage. Dylan Howard’s mother and Mr. Lewis had had a whirlwind courtship, and they’d only been married two months when the accident happened. After Dylan died and she’d lost her only child, Mrs. Lewis – whom Cat described as pretty fragile to begin with – ‘literally went outside of her mind with grief.’ Those were Cat’s words.” He rubbed his eyes with his forefinger and thumb before pinching the bridge of his nose in agitation. “She was a completely broken woman, lurching about the house like a dying animal, raving and hysterical. Mr. Lewis was forced to have her committed and the marriage annulled. Apparently they’d kept their fortunes separate going in, Cat told me, so her father had established a trust for Dylan’s mother’s care. And so she’s been there for like, five years.” John’s voice raised in pitch. “I was stupefied, gobsmacked. I’ve been to about a hundred barbecues at Cat’s dad’s place, and no one ever talks about Dylan or the former Mrs. Lewis. There’re no pictures of them anywhere, it’s like they never even existed. Jesus Christ, he was married to the woman! And she’s gone insane and is right now in a mental hospital! And why?” John’s face was purple, he was shouting. He put his hands on his head, shaking it in grim disbelief. “It’s looking more and more like it’s all because I turned left instead of right!”

“John, John,” Dr. Barnes said soothingly. “Calm down.”

“How can I calm down? Let’s sum up, shall we?” His voice was dripping with derision as he counted off on his fingers. “We have Dylan Howard, dead because I didn’t call for help; Chloë, dead because I’d forced her to go out that night and she couldn’t deal with the guilt; Mrs. Lewis, institutionalized over her son’s demise; and me, unwittingly dating – and madly in love with – Dylan’s stepsister, also involved in the accident. Oh, and let’s don’t forget Mr. Lewis’ broken home.” He shook his head bitterly. “Don’t even try to tell me this isn’t some cruel cosmic joke. And Cat had just been sitting there going on and on and on about that terrible night. She was telling me how, when Mr. and Mrs. Lewis had gotten married, Mr. Howard, Dylan’s father, had bought Dylan a sexy little Jag to like, win his love or something. I guess Mr. Howard was insecure. And Cat had been telling me how Dylan had been infuriated with ‘the slow-ass idiots in the tired truck’ – ” John made little air quotes with his fingers – “and my mind had been shrieking, ‘That was us! It was me!’ She even described how some ‘bastard had appeared, shone his lights down, and took off.’ I seriously thought I was gonna puke. And then, darkly, I remembered how my friend had said that Cat and I had had a kismet. Well, of course, this was what it was. Naturally, I hadn’t said anything, but she’d seen a change in me, because she asked if I was okay and said I looked really pale. I blamed it on the travel and rolled down the window to let the air in, pretending that it helped, but . . . . ” He laughed scathingly. “It hadn’t. My heart had been going a mile a minute; the realizations had been crashing like cymbals everywhere.” He made popping motions with his hands. “I’d been like, ‘How could you have never told me this before?’, even though how hypocritical is that? Because it’s not like I’d ever told her my secret, that I’d seen a horrific accident once and bailed. And she’d been all, ‘They’d been married less than three months when Dylan died, Diane had suffered a mental collapse, and my dad was heartbroken. We needed to put it away and move on and never talk about it again. So we relocated to  . . . . ” John trailed off. “The town he lives in now. It was basically the same line I’d given Chloë, except she and I hadn’t had the luxury of moving.”

“Hmm.” Dr. Barnes looked at him. “You’re not from around here, then?”

Without hesitation: “No.”

“It really is very important to you to not be associated with this story, isn’t it? You’ve done a lot of things to try to safeguard your identity.”

“Would you want to be associated with this story?” he asked.

“What I want is immaterial. This is your life. At some point, you have to own it, both the good and the bad. Right?”

“Okay . . . but that doesn’t mean I have to go around talking about the bad stuff at parties, either,” John answered wryly. “I hate people like that, who just put every moment of their humanity out there. I keep so much inside.” Dr Barnes nodded.

“Do you think that’s healthy?”

“I think it’s polite.”

“And what about Cat? Does this ‘politeness’ extend to her? Does she feel like you keep her at a distance?”

John regarded him with a twinkle and a smirk. “That’s uncanny. She does, in fact. But listen. She was keeping secrets, too. Huge secrets that, if she’d disclosed them, would have altered the entire trajectory of our relationship. I wouldn’t have become so vested, or I would’ve had time to adjust to the idea, to work around it. But instead she’s dropped this bombshell incredibly late in the game, after she already has me by the ear and is saying, ‘We’re getting married, see?’”

Dr. Barnes’ hands itched for his pad to take notes; this session was noteworthy. “Don’t you think that if you turned the tables, she could say the same of you?” John frowned.

“How do you mean.”

“That you’ve kept secrets that, if they’d been shared, would have changed the way that she saw you. Perhaps would have made her reconsider. I mean, that is the real reason you never told her, right? Even before you knew she was the girl in the Jag that night, you didn’t want to tell her. Not because you feared she was going to publicize it, but because you didn’t want her to know you’d done something for which you still feel a tremendous amount of guilt, deny it though you may.”

“Well . . . . ” John was confused by the comparison. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you have guilt over what happened, and you didn’t want to tell her because you were afraid it might change her perception of you. Perhaps you were subconsciously concerned she wouldn’t agree with your choice, that it would change the way she looked at you. And I’m saying perhaps she was feeling exactly the same way on her end. Perhaps she didn’t want to tell you about Dylan and – what was it? Diane?”

“Yes, Diane.”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to tell you about Dylan and Diane because it’s an unsavory chapter in the history of her family, and she was afraid of how it would change your perception of her.”

“Well, that’s ludicrous,” John answered tartly. “I worship her and she knows it.”

“So then what’s the conflict? You have your degree, you love her, you say you want to wed, you don’t have a job keeping you where you’re at, you’re surrounded by bad memories, and she’s got work waiting in New York. You should marry her, shouldn’t you?” John raked a hand through his hair.

“The conflict, Dr. Barnes, is how can I do that? Knowing what I’ve done to her family? To her? Now the sense of responsibility for that night is like a yoke around my neck.” He put his hands around his throat, his expression fatigued. “Like, for example. She has a nine-inch scar on her leg from where they had to go in and reconstruct the bone. I’d known it’d been from a car accident she didn’t like to talk about it – of course, I hadn’t known which one specifically.” He put his face in his hands again, and when he spoke, his voice was choked. “Cat and I, we live together. In the last two months, every time we’ve had sex, or I’ve seen her step out of the shower, or watched her dress, I’ve felt like her complacent assailant. And what makes it worse is that she trusts me, she doesn’t even suspect. How could I live with that for long? I love her, I can’t imagine my life without her, but how can I marry her, how long can I go on saying nothing, if it’s already eating away at me like this, just two months into the knowledge of it? The marriage will be doomed from the start, won’t it be? Eventually, my part in her past will manifest itself somehow, so it seems short-sighted to satisfy the gratification of today at the sacrifice of the long-term. It’ll only hurt her more and be a waste of her valuable time, time better spent catching a far more suitable husband.” He shook his head vehemently. “I respect her too much to do that to her. That’s why it’s not as simple as ‘just marrying’ her. Each marriage is as individual as a fingerprint, right? If I decide to marry Cat, it’s for good. I want to be sure that I can handle the terms of that covenant, because ours would involve me keeping a terrible secret. Can I do it? I don’t know.

“On the other hand, if I tell her the truth to clear my conscience, it’ll be over between us, and that’s nearly unthinkable. She’ll want to know why I didn’t confess right away, because she told me about having lived here two months ago. She will leave me, and she’ll leave easily; she has a job lined up, and she’s the kind of person who’ll do just fine wherever she is. She’s young and vivacious, she’ll be in the city . . . some guy will step into my place in five minutes, and she’ll forget I ever existed.” John’s expression was morose. “I’ll still be living on Skid Row in Podunk, wondering how I’m gonna survive without her, and she’ll be in New York, working in the music industry, and all the guys will be like, you know . . . . ” His shoulders slumped gloomily. “Suave and fashionable and six foot two.”

“Does she strike you as the kind of person who would be tempted to stray, even if you went to New York with her?” Dr. Barnes asked him with a knitted brow. “Are you concerned about her fidelity, or that she’ll outgrow you?” John scoffed.

“She’s already outgrown me. I’m a sometimes cabinetmaker in my dad’s woodworking shop. And hell, yes, I’m worried about her fidelity. I’m not a fool. Some other man will charm her with his city dollars and his apartment with a view of the park and, oh, I don’t know, a zillion other things I don’t have. And one morning she’ll wake up next to him in his California-king sized bed with its sixteen-hundred thread count sheets and its huge, fluffy down pillows, and she’ll think, ‘Oh my God, I was slumming, what the hell was I doing? I can’t marry John – Jesus, I really dodged a bullet there!’” He shook his head. “No, if I try to be honest with her, it’ll instantly turn to ash in my hands. I can’t tell her this story; it’s just not a working option. And I don’t know that marrying her is a better one – it may, in fact, be worse.” He looked up at the doctor, appearing as though he wanted to drive his head through a wall. Then, listlessly, he said: “I guess the best thing to do, for Cat at least, would be to just break up with her for no reason at all. Or at least, not the real reason.” Dr. Barnes readjusted in his chair.

“I must point out that, so far, it seems like lies and omissions have made things more, not less, difficult.”

“Please.” John fixed him with a look of deep contempt. “Say I do. Say I present Cat with the story of how our worlds collided five years ago, and the part I played, how I was the bastard who’d shone my lights down, how I was the person who’d left her behind, how I was the one who hadn’t called anybody because we’d been scared and angry and breaking the rules, and that it had led to Chloë’s downward spiral; and that erstwhile, playing out in Cat’s own home, had been the death of her stepbrother, her own reconstructive surgery, the madness of her stepmother, the annulment of her father’s new marriage, and a subsequent move. How do you think she’d react?” Dr. Barnes paused diplomatically.

“John, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t prepare yourself for a high degree of shock on her part. But – ”

“No amount of love is worth that,” he interrupted wretchedly. His eyes were baleful as he shook his head. “Her love for me will fall away from her like a snake sheds its skin. She will feel betrayed by every day we’ve spent together. Every moment that I treasure, every warm memory, will become a blasphemy to her. She will spit in my face.”

“You didn’t know,” the doctor responded gently. John’s flashing eyes met his.

“I knew enough.”

“The accident was not your fault.”

“The accident wasn’t my fault,” John agreed, “but I stood by and fiddled while Rome burned.” Dr. Barnes leaned forward.

“You can’t control the lives and actions of others, John.”

There was a long, long silence, wherein the young man lit another cigarette and smoked contemplatively. Halfway through it he said, “Well, it feels better, at least, just having said all this out loud.”

“I’m glad you feel that way, and I’d be happy to see you again. We can work something out sliding scale for your payment.”

“No,” he answered quickly. “I don’t accept charity, but thank you.”

There was another interlude, and then Dr. Barnes said, “Do you know what you’re going to do?”

“Yes.” He exhaled tremulously towards the window. “Coming here today has shown me that there’s really only one thing I can do if I don’t want to blacken every memory Cat and I have shared together. If I want this to end, I have to make it end.” For the first time in the session, John looked Dr. Barnes squarely and evenly in the eye. “I was a bad Samaritan, and Fate was watching. Now I have to pay the price for my immorality.” He stubbed out the cigarette with purpose, and the last wisp of smoke drifted towards the window. “So, even though I love Cat madly, and even though everyone from this point forward will only be her very poor substitute, I’ve decided I’m going to break up with her. I’m going to do it under false pretenses; I know you think that’s wrong, but it’s a good lie, Doctor, one to spare her. I want her to go to the city the right way, unburdened by me, maybe even angry. Ready to find someone else, anyway. But not hateful. Not scared. Not because she is running away from me. And if I tell her the truth, she will feel those things.” He stood and went to the window, looking out at the shady street trees and the sun dipping below the purple-orange horizon. “I need to make an adult choice and put Cat’s welfare before my happiness,” he said. “It hasn’t been lies and omissions that’ve caused all my problems. It’s been that I’ve acted the child. But I’m not going to do that to her. I love her too much.”

Dr. Barnes leaned forward in his chair. “John, yours is the textbook definition of a conundrum, and I don’t envy your position. If you can’t be honest with Cat, then find relief in the fact that you are a young man and you will know love again. I have every confidence in that. It may not be the same as what you have with Cat, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be as wonderful, or special, or intense. It only means it will be different. Just because you once loved Chloë doesn’t mean you love Cat any less now, does it?”

“No,” John admitted, almost petulantly.

“No. They were two different women, and they each had different virtues that you appreciated.” John looked over his shoulder at Dr. Barnes with an inscrutable expression.

“They were two different women, and I would have been happily married to either one of them; and with one decision, in one fell swoop, with a single depth charge completely unrecognizable at the time, they both slipped through my fingers.” He turned back to the window. “I don’t know that I’ll be lucky enough to find love again, Dr. Barnes, but it’s over between Cat and I. Since the moment she told me about the accident, it’s been over between us – I just wouldn’t let myself realize it. I see that now. And I see that I can’t marry her. These last two months have been a sham. Any idea that we could’ve had a future together was a silly pipe dream, because even if they never talk about the car accident, even if they never talk about Dylan Howard and the second Mrs. Lewis, I know now, you see. And that’s the difference. I’m thinking about it. And I’m thinking about Chloë. They’ve got it all settled in their minds and put away nicely, but all I see now is Cat’s scar, and how it was me who’d let her suffer.” He looked back out the window, his eyes a million miles away. “I love her desperately, but I understand now that love isn’t enough. That was a difficult concept for me to grasp before. But any marriage between us would tear me to pieces, and her, too, because I could never get away from the accident, and I could never get away from Chloë. Cat’s very presence would be a constant reminder. I would become aloof and remote, and she would be hurt and suspicious because I was unwilling to share all of myself with her.” His face went distant again. “Until I can, I can never be a good husband to her. She deserves a good husband, and I can’t be that man. So, I gotta cut her loose.”

Dr. Barnes was genuinely pained. “I’m truly sorry, John,” he said consolingly. “I can see what an agonizing decision this has been for you.”

“Yeah.” His voice was lifeless, as was his gaze as he stared out the window. “There’s nothing keeping me here anymore, so I think after this, I’ll go get sorted, for a little while, at least. There’s this town called Brookings, in Oregon, on the Pacific, right near the California border . . . I read about it in an old ‘Travel the West!’ AARP mag my grandpa had lying around the shop.”

“So you’ve thought about this.” Dr. Barnes was slightly surprised.

“Yeah, I’ve thought about it.” There was another interlude, and then John looked at the clock and started. “Oh, shit, I’m sorry. We’ve gone over.” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet.

“Just keep it,” Dr. Barnes said. “I’m glad you came today.” Even if he never came back, John had inspired the good doctor. Dr. Barnes had been intrigued and engaged by his story, and it wasn’t often that those qualities coalesced in his sessions. There’d been an interest to his work today that had been sorely lacking for some time past, an interest for which he was grateful.

John was taken aback. “Excuse me?” Dr. Barnes repeated himself, and the patient shook his head, laughing as he removed his wallet from his pants. “No, I don’t accept charity, but again, thank you.” He opened his wallet and pulled out two one hundred dollar bills. “But I’m glad I came today, too,” he agreed. “It felt good to talk about it. It really helped me sort things out just to say it all aloud.” He chuckled half to himself. “I couldn’t even identify which feelings had been my principal ones, because I hadn’t been able to talk to anybody. Today was useful just to pinpoint to myself how I really feel, if that makes sense. I really appreciate it.” He slipped his arms into his hoodie and zipped it up, again looking at the doctor straight in the face, this time with eyes somber with gratitude. “Truly.”

“Are you sure we can’t schedule another appointment?” Dr. Barnes pressed. John nodded.

“I’m sure.” He tugged on his hoodie to straighten it out and took one last drink from his coffee mug. “This time next week, I’ll be on my way to Oregon, planning hikes in the redwoods, working on a way to get Cat off my mind.” Dr. Barnes noticed the young man’s shoulders square unconsciously. “I’ll think of something.”

Dr. Barnes made no reply; the plan sounded impetuous to him, but sometimes impetuous plans were the ones that worked out best.

“Thank you,” John said. “Thanks for seeing me today, for hearing me. You’ve really helped. But I’ve got quite a way to drive, and I’ve already kept you way too long, and I want to go before it gets too dark.” He paused. “I don’t like to drive in the dark. You understand.” Dr. Barnes nodded gravely.

“Yes. Drive safely.” He stood to shake his hand. John turned and walked out the door, and the doctor listened as the sleigh bells that were hanging on the knob in the foyer sang upon his exit. Broody, he went to the window, observing the young man as he walked across the street and climbed into a green, middle-aged Dodge truck parked beneath a big ash tree. Dr. Barnes listened to the engine turn over, watched as the headlights beamed on. John rolled down his window and there was a tiny flicker of light in the cab as he lit a cigarette. His left arrow began blinking; he pulled out onto the busy boulevard; and then he was gone, vanishing into the stream of evening traffic.

Dr. Barnes watched for a long moment, unsettled, and then sat down again at his desk and phoned his wife. “Hey, baby.”

She was glad to hear from him. “Hey, Kev. Where are you? Dinner will be on in ten, and we have the Sandersons at seven, for bridge – ”

“You’ll have to set a plate aside for me tonight,” he answered, throwing the switch on his task lamp. It cast a circle of yellow light over the desk, bringing a warm balance to the cold, deepening gloaming outside. “I’m going to be at the office late.” He yanked his drawer open, scrambling for a pen. Mrs. Barnes exhaled tersely, clearly vexed.

“At the office late? What? Why?”

“Because the only story of my entire career that wanted to be unwritten is the only one worth writing down,” he answered, and hung up the phone.