She looked at me, puzzled. “Why wouldn’t we love him? That’s what families do.”

One morning on the phone, Larry cut short my complaints about writing a fourth step inventory saying, I’m going to read you something Bill Wilson wrote. Listen carefully. “Fear is an evil, corroding thread; the fabric of our lives is shot through with it. Fear is surely a bar to reason, and to love, and of course it invariably powers anger, vainglory and aggression.” Vainglory? He was a terrible writer. His prose is not the point, Henry. You don’t want to write an account of your life because you’re afraid of what you might find there but putting it off only feeds the fear. So, let me help you here and tell you what you’re going to find when you look at yourself. You’ll find you’re a garden-variety neurotic like all the rest of us, Henry. You’re not special. Is that supposed to make me feel better? Yes. Strangely, it did.

I remembered that conversation with Larry as I lay in bed that night and thought about Nick and Bill. There was a third party in their relationship from the beginning; there was Nick, Bill and Bill’s fear. I knew the fear I’d been struggling with myself, that terrible, profound ache of loneliness you feel when you know you are different and conclude that no one else in the world is like you. I woke to that fear every morning when I was a boy before I escaped my father’s house and discovered there were other boys like me. By then, however, as Larry had told me, the poison had done its work, mutating from you’ll always be alone to no one will ever love you to you’ll never be good enough to be loved. That last fear was the worst because no amount of achievement or good works could change it. It was a done deal, it was fate.