I never eat before I perform, which means I’m famished after my set. We select a pub a few blocks away from Lava. Actually, Gabriel chooses it after we walk by several much nicer places. His selection doesn’t surprise me—I know Gabriel’s aversion to fancy restaurants. It’s not that he doesn’t appreciate a good meal, but he believes spending $150 on dinner is obscene. It’s just one of the many ways he’s different from the other men with whom I’ve been involved.

Aside from the bar area, the space is relatively empty. We’re seated in the back, and I ask the waitress for a glass of white wine—Ella’s drink. Cassidy is a more of a whisky chick. Gabriel asks for a beer they have on tap, as he always does.

When the waitress walks away, Gabriel says, “I really liked the song you wrote. It’s . . . very powerful.” He chuckles. “I thought I’d heard it a hundred times through the bedroom door, but it sounds different onstage.”

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep—often, since Charlotte’s murder—I sit at the piano and quietly sing “Never Goodbye.” It feels as though I’m talking to my sister. I thought Gabriel was asleep during those sessions, but apparently not.

“I read this story once about Glenn Frey, you know, from the Eagles?”

Gabriel nods.

“When he was starting out, he rented a place on top of Jackson Browne’s apartment. He claimed that he learned how to write songs because the ceilings and floors were so thin that he could hear Jackson Browne writing ‘Doctor, My Eyes.’ He went over the hook a million times, until he had it exactly right.”

Gabriel smiles at my bit of musical trivia, but he’s not going to let me change the subject so easily. “How does it feel, singing it?”

Another thing that differentiates Gabriel from all of my previous relationships is that he cares about my internal life. He claims it’s an occupational hazard of being a police detective. They’re trained to disregard the surface stuff, the signals the perp wants you to see, and delve deeper. To detect, he says, playing on the root word of his vocation.

“It’s hard. Not gonna lie.”

“Do you really feel the way you say in the song?”

Charlotte was an aspiring novelist. Despite her disclaimers about her work being fiction, I always assumed it was autobiographical. Apparently, Gabriel thinks that’s true of my lyrics too. I can understand why, in this case, he finds that disconcerting. “Never Goodbye” is heavy with suicidal imagery. I suspect the line he’s most troubled by is the one about wanting to swim down until I’m lost forever.

“Sometimes.”

He nods, the interrogator in him trying to coax more out of me with his silence. It works.

“Less every day, though.”