“I’m here for the sake of my sister,” Howard said. “You feel bad about Benny, but what about Wanda? You cleaned out the bank accounts when you left, and while you’ve been running around conducting your investigation, she’s been working sixty hours a week to keep up the mortgage on your house. She’s been busting her ass to pay bills and buy groceries. She’s been going to bed every night not knowing where you are and wondering if you’re ever coming back. When’s the last time you even called her?”

“To say what?” I asked him. “I’m failing out here? I’m chasing my own tail?”

“What you need to do,” he said, “and I’m telling you this with nothing but love, is get your ass home and take care of the living instead of obsessing over the dead.”

What he said made sense, but sense has no place in the new world I woke into the day I got the call about Benny’s murder. For a year afterward I pretended things were the same as they’d been before, that I was the same. I went to work every day, I came home and sat down to dinner with you, and I went to bed at nine every evening. Most nights, though, I lay wide awake, begging God to let me sleep.

I tried hard, baby, but I realized I was fooling myself. I realized the old world I’d been living in died along with Benny, and I’d been stranded in a new one where madness and cruelty were the norm. How to explain this to a good woman like you, though? All you’d have heard would’ve been the raving of a lunatic. So I didn’t try. I snuck off instead, set out on this mission of mine.

And it would have been just as impossible to explain myself to Howard. I finished my coffee, stood slowly so as not to explode, and spoke softly lest I shatter every window in the place.

“Good to see you,” I said.

“Hold on, now, goddammit, hold on,” Howard said.

“Give my love to Mary and the boys.”

I tottered out of the diner, feeling like I was carrying a thousand extra pounds. I started breathing easier when I reached the Econoline, but fresh air wasn’t enough. I needed something more to keep me going. I needed a sign I was on the right path.

Be careful what you wish for, they say.

As I fumbled for my key, desperate to escape before Howard got it into his head to follow me out and press his case, I noticed an old white man standing nearby. His arms were crossed over his chest, and he regarded me through one squinted eye, the other hidden behind a black patch.

“You all right?” he said. His voice sounded like gravel in a garbage disposal.

“I’m fine,” I replied.