My brother took a nap on our living room couch when we got back, and I couldn’t help but watch him as he slept on his stomach, a pillow on his head to keep the late-afternoon sun out of his eyes. He’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia the year before, and I’d heard stories of him coming home late at night in a panic, banging on doors, convinced that someone was about to murder him. But I never witnessed any of this, not even in the couple of visits I made to New York after he started using; Papa thought that Tony wanted to be on his best behavior whenever I was around. Maybe the childhood he spent under my thumb had kept my brother deferent, and I wondered whether I should offer to let him live with me. But I dismissed this idea as soon as I thought it, terrified of failing at taking care of another person the way my parents did with both of us.

I was expecting Tony to stay at least another day, but he decided to go back on the bus as soon as he woke up; old friends of his in the city had Saturday night plans. I offered to ride the subway with him, but he insisted that he knew the way and that we’d see each other the next time I was in New York. I didn’t consider until years later that he must have left early to look for drugs.

—

Ralph and I spent the rest of the summer in Europe, first in England and then France. I woke up to the charm of his family home in Surrey, a three-story stone structure that had once been a paper mill, next to a river that reminded me of The Mill on the Floss. As I looked out the window of Ralph’s childhood room, the expanse of rolling green outside reminded me that the house was situated at the bottom of Box Hill, precisely where Emma, the first Austen novel I ever read, was set. When I walked around outside, it really did feel like I was in one of those novels, where English gentlemen came upon and wooed their brides-to-be, down to a bench in Ralph’s family garden that was braided out of live vines, their roots still planted in the ground, which didn’t feature in any Austen novel but could easily have.

Being there reminded me that my relationship with Ralph was at the aftermath of courtship, the settled bond between two like minds. If it didn’t have that dynamic of a man chasing after a woman, then so much the better, because the world needed fewer regressive stereotypes, romantic as they were. We habitually took the train to London and spent afternoons poring through used books at Skoob, evenings in the theater at the Old Vic or Donmar Warehouse, walks on the bank of the Thames.