“It was a way to avoid the things I didn’t want to confront,” he says. “Drinking was a way to pretend that they weren’t happening. A way to escape what I was feeling. My insecurities. My fears. My shame. My inadequacies as an actor. As a person.”

I notice then how still Gabe is. How he’s sitting there, across from me, and not fidgeting, not restlessly moving.

“Sobriety gives me strength,” he says. “The strength to face the things I wanted to hide from.”

“Like your marriage?” I ask.

“Success” was what I’d meant to say. Not marriage. And I definitely hadn’t meant to ask it in that bitter, angry tone.

I didn’t really want to talk about him and Jacinda.

This interview already feels dangerously personal, with Gabe being as vulnerable and open as he is. It makes it hard to be angry at him. But that anger is what’s protecting me. I need it.

“Chani,” Gabe says, and his eyes are so very sad.

But before he can say any more, our food arrives.

He watches me put my fries on my burger and after I’ve taken a bite, swallowed, and glanced back at my notebook looking for another question, he picks up right where we left off.

“I fucked up a lot,” he says. “And my marriage…”

He pauses.

“It was complicated. But I don’t regret it.”

It’s a bit like a boot to the chest, those words.

“Why would you?” I ask, going for breezy. “ ‘Jacinda Lockwood is the most beautiful woman in the world.’ ”

That had been the headline they gave her when she landed on the cover of Vogue this last spring.

“She was a good friend to me,” Gabe says. “Is a good friend.”

“Mmhmm,” I say, looking down at my notebook, looking for questions that will get us away from this topic.

“What about you?” he asks.

“I didn’t marry Jacinda Lockwood,” I say.

“You did marry the Novelist,” he says.

“Jeremy,” I say.

“ ‘The man with his finger on the pulse of modern literature,’ ” Gabe says.

It was a pull quote from The New York Times’ review of Jeremy’s first book.

The day he’d heard had been a good day.

It had been a struggle for him to write the book. When I moved to New York, the release date had been pushed out twice and he still barely had a manuscript. This time he had been the one struggling with focus. By that point, I was working consistently and managed to convince Jeremy to stick to a rigid writing schedule in order to get the book done.

He’d resisted at first, but it was successful in the end.