For his part, Fitz couldn’t remember a more depressing period in his life. Joanie came back to him, yes, and they were sleeping in the same bed and had one or two Saturday sessions where they melted into each other like before, but it couldn’t touch what he’d experienced with Lori—and Lori, infuriatingly, didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. She was always busy, reading, sketching, writing poetry in her big looping schoolgirl’s hand, helping in the kitchen, wandering the hills with her shoulders hunched and her head down or just sitting there playing solitaire in front of the fire, and no, she didn’t want company, and no, she didn’t want to play two hands or pitch or hearts or anything else. Corey was no help. He was more distant than ever, and when Fitz tried to talk to him about Nancy and about what Jackie and some of the others—Lori—were risking with their massive doses of the drug, he got defensive, and after he’d got defensive, he denied everything. (“I never did it with Nancy or anybody else, I swear, not that it’s any of your business—or Mom’s either. And the only dose I ever take is a hundred mics, once a month—it’s a sacrament, remember?”) But the worst thing, the worst thing by far, was the Beacon School District. He was making thirty dollars a day, minus withholding and the cost of the traffic tickets, and to earn that pittance he had to endure overcrowded classrooms crammed to the windows with savage fermenting adolescents who saw him as a weak-kneed fraud and nothing more, and on top of that, every time he stepped out in the hall he was subjected to the unforgiving looks of his former colleagues. He wasn’t at Harvard. He wasn’t a Ph.D. He wasn’t climbing the academic ladder or making advances in the field. No, he was back here in prison, the worst kind of recidivist, and no time off for good behavior.

“Hey, Fitz, I heard you were back,” one of the English teachers, Ron Wiesenthal, said to him in the hall one day.

“Yeah.”

Students—kids—flowed by them as if they were snags in a stream, which, in essence, they were. Ron had bags under his eyes. His suit was rumpled. He’d aged prematurely. He was nothing in the scheme of things and Fitz was—or had been. “So you’re okay, then? Things are good?”