It was funny. Not long after we got married, Karly was digging around in Edgar’s apartment, helping him straighten things up, and she found a photograph of me when I was about twelve years old. This was before everything happened with my parents. Before the high school years when Edgar and I argued over grades and girls and smoking and drugs. I didn’t look all that different back then, not physically. I still had the same messy haircut, and I was already about as tall as I was ever going to be. But Karly looked at that photograph and then over at me, and I could see what she was thinking.

What happened to you, Dylan?

Back then, I had a big smile and a wide-eyed innocence. I’d been a happy kid, but that young kid was long gone. He’d died in the bedroom with my parents. Staring at my reflection in the hotel window, with the park and the lake hovering behind my face, I said the same thing out loud.

“What happened to you, Dylan?”

Then I put a half-full bottle of vodka to my lips, drank what was left, shouted a profanity at the city about a dozen times, and threw the glass bottle against the wall. It broke into razor-like pieces that sprayed across the bedsheets. I sighed with disappointment at myself. It always happened like this, again and again. I went and gathered up the shards, and then I sat down by the side of the bed and squeezed the glass fragments in my fists until blood oozed through my fingers.

For the rest of the night, I stayed right there, until the blood dried and I finally fell asleep.

The first wave of grief can’t go on forever. You may feel dead, but eventually you realize you’re still alive, and you have to figure out how to go on.

On the morning of the fourth day, I picked out a suit from the closet in my hotel room. My assistant manager, Tai, had arranged for some of my work clothes to be sent here from my apartment. She was efficient that way. I took a shower, put on the suit, knotted a tie tightly against my neck, and left the room. I wasn’t really ready to go back out into the world, but I didn’t have a choice.

I took the elevator to the lobby. The LaSalle Plaza was one of downtown’s grand old hotels, dating all the way back to the White City days of the Chicago World’s Fair. You could feel turn-of-the-century ghosts here, passing you with a brush of silk. The lobby glistened with marble floors, a chambered ceiling, and elaborately decorated archways of glass, brass, and stone.