He breathed in sharp, let it out slow, like relieved to be past the really hard part. “Well, I went off the rails. Shut myself up in the house. Stopped answering my phone. Burned my novel page by page. Forgot to eat. The usual sort of thing when you can’t understand why you’re alive when your loved one isn’t.

“Then one day, Julian showed up. My bad-kid brother. He’d stayed in the city with his friends. At least a year since I’d seen him, maybe three. He’d been this truant pre-adolescent. Now here he was, all sleek and tough, telling me to ‘get a fuckin’ grip.’ ”

So totally Julian. With the worst revealed, I felt I’d been invited back into the conversation. “Did you?”

“I said, what do you care? Then we yelled at each other for a week or two, threw the occasional punch.” His smile was so faint, it was practically invisible. “Yeah, I know. But people show their real stuff, turning up when you least expect it . . . when you don’t even know how much you need them.” Daniel wet his lips, smiled crookedly. “Julie said, ‘The whole fuckin’ world’s falling apart, Dan. Why not enjoy it while you can?’ ”

I could picture it. “What did you do?”

“My life upstate was finished. I’d been ready to find a gun, pull the plug. Curiosity . . . and Julian . . . saved me. Had to see how this screwed-up mess will work out. I let Julie drag me back to the city. That was two years ago, and here I am.” He spread his hands, and I saw the gesture as stoic instead of cynical. He turned back and started picking again. “Not so rare a story these days. But I wanted you to know.”

I let out a long breath. “Do you still write?”

“What would be the point?”

Any words of comfort I could conjure were way too trite. Plus, I was among the lucky. I’d survived my ordeal, and his Sara had not. I was glad he’d loved someone before, enough to get married. It made him human, wounded like the rest of us, not the all-knowing Book Dude I’d built up in my mind. “Must have been hard to leave, with all you had up there.”

“Not really. That life was over.” He read the doubt I was struggling to hide. “You’re thinking, a house in the hills, a garden, I should have stayed? Don’t buy that fantasy. I’d have to weapon up, defend every inch of turf, every goat in the barn, every carrot in the row. I’ve no problem with guns, but that’s not a life. Sooner rather than later, I’d end up as dead as Sara. When someone wants what you have, you can’t build walls high enough.”