Tonight, though—sitting in one of the uncomfortable chairs at a messy workstation right in the center of the ED—he was struggling with his own scribbled clues, frustrated with the way his brain was slow to jog and to focus, to remember what a phrase like sock history/hamster??? meant, especially when for two weeks and two days his mind had teemed with all sorts of useless fragments, memories he didn’t want or need, things that made him think of Donny and his mom and, most of all, of Nora.

Of Nora and what he’d done to her, the morning he’d last seen her.

You think I’d take your kid?, he could hear Donny saying, each time the memories would come back to him. It was clear like day, Donny’s voice, no matter when Will heard it. Clear like the afternoon sky when he’d stood beneath Donny’s balcony for the first time. He’s probably turned out like you, he’d hear, and then the real hits would come.

Rash.

Reckless.

Selfish.

Will had hated Donny for saying those things about his mother, and by extension, about him. But he couldn’t deny the effect they’d had on him; he couldn’t deny that he’d heard something true in them. Everything about his life that felt chaotic to him—his moods, his temper, his intensity over his baseball games and his frivolous crushes—he’d ended it, after that day. In his house, he was half ghost, half manager. He ducked in and out of rooms, bringing things to his mom and dad, disappearing again when he’d done whatever service was required of him. He’d use the phone he’d brought into his room to make the calls his mother couldn’t bear to. He wrote checks from his bed, his biology textbook a lap desk, the imitation of his father’s signature practically a work of art. He studied. He cleaned. He counted pills. He planned burials: first, his father’s, long expected, and ten and a half months later, his mother’s—not expected but still somehow not shocking—when an aneurysm took her in her sleep. He got loans. He got into college, then medical school, then residency. He focused.

I’m a responsible person. I’m a practical person.

His own words now, the ones he’d used to win with Nora, to stop the feud over the apartment. He’d meant them, of course he had. They were the same words he repeated to himself, every day for years until he’d believed them, until he’d become them: Will who works late, Will who stays even-tempered, Will who puts everyone else at ease.