“She’s really something,” he said. Behind him, the band finished their song and turned to their sheet music for inspiration. “I was starting to think it would never happen . . . her and me,” he said, sipping his beer, gazing back toward the bathroom, as if he could draw her back by will alone.

“You should be careful,” Kate said almost too quietly to be heard. She knew the words, and the warning, would reveal something of her heart, but she couldn’t help herself. Johnny might wear the suit of a cynic at work, but at the hospital she’d learned the truth. Inside, where it mattered, he was an idealist. No one bruised as easily as a believer. She should know.

Johnny leaned toward her. “What was that, Mularkey?”

She shook her head. There was no way she could say it again, and besides, Tully was back.

Much later, when she lay in her lonely bedroom, listening to the sound of lovemaking coming from another room, she finally cried.

In the months since their party night at Kells Pub, Kate was not the only one to notice the change in Johnny. As autumn settled into the city and stripped it of color, the mood in the office became sullen and quiet. Mutt kept completely to himself, cleaning and rearranging his equipment, filing negatives in notebooks. Carol, who had been cajoled back to work after Tully’s departure, stayed in her own office, with the door shut, barely saying a word to everyone, even when she got her coffee.

No one said a word about Johnny’s appearance, but everyone saw that he seemed lately to be simply rolling out of bed and coming to work. His hair was too long and beginning to curl in all kinds of weird ways. He hadn’t shaved in days; his beard grew in dark, shadowed patches on his hollowed cheeks, and his clothes often didn’t match.

The first few times he’d come to work this way, they’d rallied around him like geese, clucking their worry. Quietly but firmly he’d shut the door to his office, saying he was fine. Mutt had mounted an offensive that began with an offer of pot and ended with, “Whatever, man. I’m here if you wanna talk.”

Carol had tried in her own way to swim the invisible moat Johnny had ringed around himself; her attempts failed as utterly as Mutt’s.

The only one who didn’t try to reach Johnny was Kate, and she was the only one who knew what the problem was.

Tully.

Just that morning, as they’d been having breakfast, Tully had said, “Johnny keeps calling me. Should I go out with him again?”

Fortunately for Kate, it had turned out to be a rhetorical question. Tully answered it herself. “No way. I want a relationship like I want a lethal injection. I thought he knew that.”