“Sorry, that’s my thing.” Scott turned toward his bookcase, searching. “When I came back from Nam, I did all the wrong you could imagine. I drank, I drugged, I fought, I thugged. Lost the love of a good woman and most of my family, ended up spending two years on the street. All the while, he kept coming back, and I ran like hell, until I found an outlet.”

He turned back, book in hand.

“What you can’t tell from my speech, but I assure you would be clear on a page, my he is spelled with a capital h.”

“As in God?”

“Oh no.” He handed her a dust-jacketed hardcover of the book she’d studied in college—Up River: A Collection of Poems by Scott Canton. “Try the back.”

She flipped the book over and met two Cantons. The first, a black and white image of a smiling high school student in a dress shirt and tie. The second, a color shot of Scott with a severe Jim Kelly-Enter the Dragon afro, a goatee, and a bright yellow turtleneck, not even a hint of a smile.

He sat back in his chair. “How many years do you guess passed between the photos?”

Caitlin felt the answer was ten. “Eight?”

“Four. That first shot was my senior class photo. My girlfriend took the second a day after bailing me out of jail for breaking a man’s jaw.”

“Which scared you—the older?”

“No.” He tapped on the high school student. “This grinning idiot haunted my every move. I couldn’t make peace with the disparity, do you follow? Who I was versus who he thought I was supposed to be. Yes, there were flashbacks. Yes, I saw terrible things, did terrible things, but he was the one staring me in the face when I got home—the he that was never going to be me again.”

Caitlin set the book on the desk. “Pronouns are the worst.”

“Mine was. Talk about yours. Your assault happened twenty years ago. Were you having these attacks back in Los Angeles?”

Caitlin shifted in her chair, looked out the window, saw a squirrel zip across a branch. Pretty high up, no sign of fear.

“Caitlin?”

She kept her eyes on the squirrel but answered. “Not until last month, when Mary called.”

“About this trip?”

The squirrel leapt away, out of sight. Caitlin turned back to reality. “She mentioned the diploma, and I was drunk enough to say yes.”

“Then what?”

“I threw up that night. I figured bad roach-coach carnitas, I got what I deserved, but it happened again the next day. Then I had a dream. Mary and I were studying for a test in a bar and ran out of beer, so I went for refills. At the bar I saw a face. His face.”

“The man who attacked you?”