After the story is completed and Jacob rolls away from me, I lie in bed beside him. Tonight Jacob rewards me by falling asleep in my company, and I spend a few minutes watching his little chest rise and fall with each breath. And thinking about what I’ve done.

“I keep meaning to ask whether the school moved that boy away from him,” I say to Stuart when I return to the living room.

“Which boy?”

A week or so ago—before Lauren’s murder, which now seems like ages ago—Jacob came home crying because of some altercation with a boy who sat next to him during story time. Among the boy’s other infractions, he tapped on the desk as if it were a drum, and Jacob found it annoying. I wanted to call the teacher, but Stuart convinced me to give it a day. Then Lauren was murdered and I had a more serious crime to investigate than tapping with intent to annoy. Now I fear that nothing has been done to rectify the situation—yet another failing in my son’s life for which I’m culpable.

“The tapper.”

“Oh . . . Ross. It turns out that he and Jacob share a love of some video game, and now they’re besties.”

“Really?”

“Yup. If only all problems could be so easily resolved, right?”

On our third date, Stuart told me that his father had taught college mathematics, and that as a child he imagined professional mathematicians to be the kind of people who live in the abstract ether, detached from the rest of humanity. The kind of misanthropes who would rather work a good proof to completion than have a discussion with another human being.

“He was never home,” Stuart explained. “Always logging long hours at the university. So I developed this worldview where I saw mathematics as a kind of calling, like the priesthood, compelling its chosen few to pursue it above all else, including family.”

We were sitting in front of a restaurant fireplace, drinking bourbon. I hadn’t considered Stuart to be particularly handsome before that night, but there was something about the way his profile was illuminated by the flame, the warmth I felt from the alcohol, and the way he was opening up to me that caused me to realize he was much more attractive than I had previously thought.