“Then keep them coming.” Henry left the twenty, gathered the stacked glasses and plastic pitcher, then followed Michelle out to the patio.

He really did try to pace himself on the first beer. He used each frothy ring left inside the glass to tally the rate of his progress. Thirteen sips in ten minutes. Seemed reasonable, responsible. Reaching for the pitcher, he wondered if maybe—just maybe—there might have been some logic behind the inpatient rule against patients sharing contact info.

The second slid down his throat as if of its own accord. After that he was cooled and golden and gave up counting foam rings in his pint glass or minutes between top-offs. The only measurement worth tracking was the number of inches between his knee and Michelle’s, which he was monitoring through the black iron grating of the patio table.

“Dark in there,” Michelle said. “Creepy, like.”

“Mood lighting, I guess.”

“Nah, Hen. Creepy as in morbid. You can pretty much hear them dying, strangled to death.”

“Strangled? Who?”

“All them little dickheads. Getting choked out by waistbands, like. Ugly way to go.”

For someone who hated the world so much that she deliberately expelled any nutrition it offered, Michelle sure had a good sense of humor. Dark, irreverent, and delivered with a tight-lipped deadpan, which only made him want to see that grim smile of hers all the more. She took a squirrel sip of beer, still her first. Henry had long lost count of how many pints he’d knocked back, but was pretty sure the pitcher—half-empty—was their, well, his second. Any lingering unease from the drive down and his first time in a strip club was ebbed away by the beer and the easy drift of their conversation.

Group therapy had been competitive, a daily pissing contest of adolescent suffering and survival, but here they could talk about their thoughts and selves without shame. Based on what she was saying now, plus the few snippets she’d ceded in group sessions or traded him in the TV room, he was beginning to stitch together a fuller sense of her history. Back at inpatient, personal milestones had been marked by traumas rather than the conventional sequence of graduation, college, career, marriage, mortgage, kids, and merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, till death did them part. In Michelle’s case, all the social workers and shrinks had made a hasty, concerted effort to fasten her two trauma milestones to bedrock. Number one: her mother had died in childbirth with her. This, she said, was what the professionals called Bingo.

Back when Henry first learned she’d lost her mother, a guilty thrill had rocketed through him, believing this might actually bring them closer. After group, when he’d pointed out their shared grief in the TV room, she sort of deflated. Gave him a sorry look.

“True,” she said. “But at least I never met mine.”