He wasn’t, not really. It certainly looked official—the bottle, the description, the warnings—but who was prescribing it, Tim? Tim wasn’t a medical doctor. (Walter Pahnke, another of Tim’s grad advisees, was, but Walter was conspicuously absent on this particular evening, and whether his presence was needed or not, at least it would have been comforting.) Fitz nodded, then found himself grinning back. “Why am I thinking of Superman?”

Tim laughed. “Everybody says that. It’s the big S, the triangle, the whole works, and I’m not promising you you’re going to be able to see through walls or mold diamonds in your fist or fly around the world at supersonic speeds—‘It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Fitz!’—but you never know, you just might.”

Turning to Joanie, Tim said, “Ladies first,” and she held out her hand while he shook the bottle over it and counted out not fifteen but ten pills. “Beginner’s dose,” he said with a wink, then turned to him. Dutifully, Fitz presented his cupped palm, felt the fleeting tap of the bottle’s rim at the base of his thumb, heard Tim counting aloud, “Two, four, six, eight, ten,” while the MJQ tinkled through the chord changes of “Lonely Woman” and conversation started up around him again as if after a long withheld breath.

Tim’s face glowed in the light of the table lamp, an Irish face, quintessentially Irish, right down to the cool hooded eyes and the faint twist of the nose. He’d turned forty-one back in October but looked ten years younger—no older than Fitz himself—and he was fit and handsome, his hair trimmed in the universal crew cut and hardly a trace of gray in it. He favored tweeds, like the suit he had on now, and he even managed to make the hearing aid he wore look stylish, its cord descending into the same inner pocket from which he’d extracted the pill bottle. “All right?” he asked.

“All right,” Fitz heard himself say, and then he was throwing back the pills two at a time and washing them down with measured sips from the glass, all the while telling himself there was nothing to worry about—it was research, that was all, only research.