Glenna slid over close to me.

I said, “I drive over to Potomac and tell my ex. Beth starts screaming, ‘How could you let this happen? Why did I ever let Alex live with you?’ Her husband tries to calm her down—he’s a decent, levelheaded guy—but Beth won’t stop. And while she’s carrying on, I’m thinking she’s right: it’s my fault. I go home, and I’m sitting around trying to figure out what I did—maybe letting Alex see the medals—I don’t know. I was losing it. I get in the car, and on my way to New York I stop at the cemetery in Jersey. I’m standing in the snow, asking my mom and dad and Aunt Lil and Uncle Jerr to find Alex, and I’m thinking that if someone hears me, they’ll call the cops and I’ll get locked up in a rubber room.”

Glenna said, “You can’t blame …,” but that was all I heard before a familiar tightness in my chest squeezed the air from my lungs, and I sat back, trying to catch my breath and staring up at the track lighting, imagining that moments ago Glenna and I had returned from Little Italy, and I was about to kiss her for the first time.

“Gordon, are you all right?”

“Glenna,” I said, and then I said nothing, because I couldn’t figure out how to explain myself without coming off like a twenty-four-karat head case.

I was still trying to figure it out when Glenna placed her hand on my forearm and said, “This is me, Gordon. You can tell me. You can tell me anything.”

I shifted my gaze from the ceiling to Glenna, and it struck me, as it had so many times before, that I never tired of looking at her, never stopped being overwhelmed by the contours of her face, the high cheekbones, the obvious intelligence in her expression, and how her eyes, when she studied you, appeared to brighten from jade to emerald.

“The reason—the reason I came to New York was that if I could get back into the past with you, I could …”

“Could?” she said.

“Could pretend none of this had happened. That everything was in front of me. In front of us. It sounds crazy, but I wanted—for just one night—to believe I was going to have a different future. A future with you. A future where my son wasn’t missing in the middle of a goddamn war.”

“Not so crazy.”

Outside, a train whistle wailed in the distance, and suddenly I was crying. The worst of it wasn’t the rapid, deep-lung sobbing that shook me like a seizure, nor the feverish terror that had been searing me from head to toe since Alex went missing, nor the photo album I kept behind my eyes—Alex building a sand castle; Alex learning to ride a bike; Alex in a tux the night of his senior prom. No, as agonizing as these images were, the worst torment was the conviction that I’d failed to do the one thing, above all others, that I was supposed to do—protect my child. And the punishment for this abject failure was to pass most of each day and night suffocated by my guilt.