“Good. I’ll go alone. Which will make me feel less alone than if you were there but not really there with me.”

* * *

It’s quiet after Gary leaves. Too quiet. I look around the room and realize Sari was right—it’s a beautiful space: high ceilings, big windows with the same kitchen view of rolling fields; linen couches and overstuffed armchairs and walls of bookshelves. For the first time since we got here, I touch things—big glass paperweights, the topstitching on throw pillows, the frames of happy-couple family photographs—and I’m sad suddenly, missing Teddy, and the dog, and Glenn. I’m just about to open a desk drawer out of habit—I’ve always been a compulsive snoop, curious to know the mundane things about people—what they eat, what they read, how they arrange their clothes and their closets, the kind of toothpaste and floss they use—my fingers are looped around a heavy brass drawer-pull when Andy appears in the doorway with a dinner tray.

“Looking for something?” she says eyeing me, before explaining the soup. “Sari said your husband said you didn’t feel well.”

I know that if her hands were free she would have pumped air quotes around that entire sentence. I drop my hand from the drawer-pull. “Just chocolate!” I lie.

“You won’t find any in this house. Skin and Bones wouldn’t eat chocolate unless her pills were covered in it.”

We have a nickname. I can’t wait to tell Gary. When we start speaking to each other again.

Andy puts the tray on the desk, then bends down and slowly slides the bottom left-hand drawer open. She reaches in, behind what looks like a stack of envelopes, and pulls out a fat white joint. “Is this what you were looking for?” I don’t answer, so she sniffs the rolled joint, lights it, takes a long slow drag, then hands it to me. After all the times I’ve said no to Gary, I take it from her without hesitation. Why not? It’s been a shitty day. I take a second drag when that’s offered, too, but refuse a third.

“So tell me about these people, Andy. Sari and Gregory.” I lean back against the desk, and close my eyes. Something is definitely happening to my brain already.

“You don’t need me to tell you what your eyes can plainly see.”

I inhale, then nod. “They seem like such phonies. Such narcissists. Peddling confidence and snake oil and big dreams to the disenfranchised and downtrodden.”

Andy raises an eyebrow. “Don’t get crazy.”

“Sorry. I mean, the creatively disenfranchised and downtrodden.”

She stares at me and shrugs. “All I know is that they’re in the business of telling people what they want to hear and these people are hungry for it. They eat it up.”

“I hate myself for being here.”

“Then why did you come?”

I tell her that I came because I’m desperate, that I’m stuck, that I have writer’s block. I tell her that I know it sounds like a First World Problem except that it’s how I used to earn a living, for my family. I try to guess Andy’s age—she’s probably twenty-five, or twenty-eight, definitely under thirty. She probably has no idea what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t have at that age. “This was a last-ditch effort to restart my career, but I barely wrote anything today, despite a million different prompts that seemed to work for everyone else. Including my husband, who was the star of the day. And he wasn’t even supposed to be here!”