“I don’t want to intrude,” he said, which he recognized was exactly what people said when they wanted to be told they weren’t intruding. And he realized that this was, actually, exactly what he wanted to be told. He wanted to have dinner with Gerald and Sally because he was confused and frustrated and lonely enough that a meal with a possibly reconciling couple sounded absolutely fine, or at least absolutely better than going back to his own place and staring into the void, thinking about how Nora would be back tomorrow night and he still had no idea what to do.

“You are not intruding because I already told Sally you were coming,” Abraham said. “I phoned her two hours ago.”

“What if I’d had other plans?”

There was a brief pause, Abraham looking up at Will like he’d just tried to splint a finger in the middle of a massive trauma.

“I’m sure you think you’re rather mysterious, Dr. Sterling,” he finally said, in that clipped, professional-rectitude voice. “But in fact it is very clear that your problem lately is that you have no plans at all.”

For the first hour or so, it didn’t really help.

One problem was that Gerald’s place—though larger and in a posher part of town—was disturbingly similar to Will’s own, at least in terms of the details. Like Will, Gerald seemed to have missed the memo on hanging artwork or putting furniture in places other than “up against a wall.” Also like Will, he seemed to have an aversion to household items that didn’t serve any particular function; beyond the couch, chair, and coffee table, the living room had nothing in it except a floor lamp and five shelves of books, most of them related to medicine. Will had two such shelves, and all of a sudden he saw the next three decades of his life built out in front of him: one shelf at a time, more and more books about the only thing he filled his time with.