“What time tonight did that guy come around for the car keys?”

“Before eight, why?”

“It looks like he never got here. I have the car fixed—that’s not the problem. I’m coming right up there.”

He hung up. He put together a complete change of clothes, shirt, underwear, socks—everything. He had half his clothes at her place, but suddenly he felt he had to demonstrate to himself that he was in charge of his life, that he would have clean underwear in the morning. His mother would be laughing out loud. Was his head spinning? At least he was thinking that he didn’t want Eileen to see the scrapes on his hands and knees. That could wait. He would undress in the dark tonight.…

At the beginning of the day, when he’d gotten the first idea about the trouble he was in, Devlin had thought about booze, about the absolute necessity for keeping straight in his mind why he would reach for booze in a situation like this. At the first sign of stress, the commercials said. Now he was thinking of the long-term, heavy consequences of this sort of bone-twisting nightmare. From his apartment to Eileen’s was a gauntlet of Irish saloons that could only remind him of what he had done to himself in the past. He wasn’t interested in having a drink now, not at all. He knew exactly what steps he would have to take to get him in front of a bottle as big and bright as a box office: he would have to begin to worry about who was doing this to him and why, grieve over it, worry about what was coming next and what the consequences of that would be, closing his mind to everything in his life but what was wrong with it. The thing that was wrong, that could grow and finally overwhelm him—what did it have to be? How big? Only as big as the awareness that his enemies, whoever they were, thought he had a weakness.…

All ancient history—that’s what he had to remember, and not just to stay sober, either. The people who were working against him didn’t know the man he was today. A.A. had gotten Devlin sober, everybody knew that. Devlin had continued to change, grow, and develop. That was what somebody out there didn’t understand about Frank Devlin today: he had the depth and perspective to stay on top of his life.

His normal life. Devlin wanted to remember that.