She’d turned it in two days earlier, and I’d started reading it the day before after waking up in the grip of the mother of all hangovers. When I’d first started reading the book, my head thumping, my gorge rising and falling like waves on the sea, I worried I liked it so much because it was taking my mind off being sick from alcohol.

But as the day went on, and as the story gripped me more and more, compelling me to turn the pages faster and faster, I knew—I knew—my reaction was a true one. Madeline had managed to write an outstanding novel—one about a young woman being murdered in a college town—the kind of thing most people never wrote in an entire lifetime of trying. Somehow she’d managed to do it at age twenty-two, during her senior year of college.

I didn’t know whether to be jealous or proud.

I went back and forth between both emotions. With a little shock thrown in. I’d never had an undergraduate student—or any student—write something so good. Had never imagined that an undergraduate at Commonwealth University in Kentucky would reach such heights at such a young age.

I’d needed the coffee when I finished with showering and shaving. My hangover from the day before had faded. The familiar thumping in my head, the roiling in my guts, was over. I poured food into Grendel’s bowl and checked my phone. A missed call from one of my English Department colleagues, Lance Hoffman, which struck me as odd. Lance rarely called. He didn’t even like to text.

“Why’s he calling?” I asked the empty kitchen.

The dog gave me the side-eye, then bent to eat. Grendel moved in after Emily and Jake had been dead a year. My department chair, Preston White, rescued Grendel from the local shelter and then found out his youngest daughter was mildly allergic.

“I think he’d be happy living with you,” Preston said when he showed up on my doorstep with a forty-pound bag of dog food, a leash, and a dish. “He needs a home. You need company.”

I thought the allergy story was a dodge, a way to make the handing over of Grendel seem less like an act of charity and more like a necessity. But I didn’t argue. I needed to get outside myself. I needed to have something to care for. Someone to notice if I came home at night or not. But sometimes I saw the way Grendel looked at me. Was it possible for the dog to show pity? To judge me?

At those times I would say, “Boy, you should have seen me in my prime. You should have seen me before the moon and the stars crash-landed on my head.”