By the time I left my apartment, the temperature had risen into the high forties, and the muted sun, trying to push through the sheet of hard sky, looked like an orange trapped just beneath the surface of a frozen pond.

Walking up Lewis Wharf toward Diandra Warren’s apartment, I’d removed my jacket as the sun finally broke through, and now as we drove back to the neighborhood, the mercury hovered in the high sixties.

We drove past Copp’s Hill, and the warm breeze sweeping off the harbor rustled the trees overlooking the hill and several handfuls of burnished red leaves crested the slate headstones and fluttered down onto the grass. On our right, the stretch of wharfs and docks glinted under the sun, and to our left the brown, red, and off-white brick of the North End hinted of tile floors and old open doorways and the smells of thick sauces and garlic and freshly baked bread.

“Can’t hate the city on a day like this,” Angie said.

“Impossible.”

She grasped the back of her thick hair with one hand and twisted it into a makeshift ponytail, tilting her head toward the open window to catch the sun on her face and neck. Watching her with her eyes closed and a small grin on her face, I was almost prepared to believe that she was completely healthy.

But she wasn’t. After she left her husband, Phil, left him in a bloody heap retching off her front porch, payment for having tried to batter her body one time too many, Angie passed the winter in the mist of an increasingly short attention span and a dating ritual which left a succession of males scratching their heads as she abandoned them without notice and moved on to the next.

Since I’ve never been a paragon of moral virtue, I couldn’t say much to her without sounding like a hypocrite, and by early spring she seemed to have bottomed out. She quit bringing warm bodies home and started to participate fully in case work again, even fixed up her apartment a bit, which for Angie meant she cleaned the oven and bought a broom. But she wasn’t whole, not like she used to be.

She was quieter, less cocky. She’d call or drop by my apartment at the oddest hours to talk about the day we just shared. She also claimed she hadn’t seen Phil in months, but for some reason I couldn’t fully explain, I didn’t believe her.

This was all compounded by the fact that for only the second time in all the years we’ve known each other, I couldn’t always be there for her at a moment’s notice. Since July, when I met Grace Cole, I’d been spending whole days and nights, sometimes full weekends, with her whenever we could get time together. Occasionally I’m also enlisted into babysitting duty for Grace’s daughter, Mae, and so I’m often beyond the reach of my partner except in the case of an absolute emergency. It wasn’t something either of us ever really prepared for, since as Angie once put it: “There’s a better chance of seeing a black guy in a Woody Allen movie than seeing Patrick in a serious relationship.”