She said it so nicely, so genuinely, that Will thought he probably could’ve told her the whole thing, and she would’ve listened.

I’ve got this fear, he could’ve said, that I’m exactly like my parents. He could’ve said, I’ve got this fear that I don’t know how to love anyone any other way. He could’ve told her about what had happened to him, when he’d seen that picture: a big, blurry rush of unpleasant memories. He could have told her that seeing his parents so young and in love had only reminded him of where they’d ended up: utterly lost at the prospect of being without each other.

I’ve got this fear that I’d lose sight of everything else.

But Will’s boss was still in the other room and Sally didn’t have all night, and anyway, this wasn’t as simple as fixing up Donny’s apartment or finding a home for the two cats sitting next to him. This wasn’t the kind of thing Sally could have a solution for.

So instead he said, “She and I, we’re pretty different.”

Sally shrugged. “Gerald and I are different.”

“You’re divorced.”

She pursed her lips and cocked her head at him, giving him an exasperated look. “Obviously,” she said, “we are working on it.”

He nodded down at his placemat, appropriately chastened.

“Will,” Sally said, and he could tell a big, frustrated, Why are you like this? sigh was lingering beyond it. “Let me ask you a question.”

One of the cats started to climb onto his lap. Quincy, which meant it was fifty-fifty he was about to get peed on, screamed at, or both.

“Why not,” he said blandly, pretty much to both Sally and Quincy.

“Do you want to work on it?”

Quincy’s tail swiped across Will’s face like an admonishment, and frankly, it was extremely clarifying. Of course you try to fix a brain bleed, asshole, he thought to himself, straightening in his chair. It was like having an anchor dropped in his body, slowing him down enough to see his surroundings, to actually think for what felt like the first time in days, maybe since he’d seen that picture. He thought about Gerald in the other room, washing dishes and probably deep breathing through his annoyance over Sally’s elbows on the table. He thought of Gerald in the hospital, asking him about purchasing a kitten or a gift card, trying to sort out ideas for nonroutine dates.