“Brooklyn or bust,” Cal used to say.

And this was before every budding musician in the country was moving to Brooklyn to start a band. This was back in the mid-’90s, when people were still heading to Seattle for their musical fortunes and fame. But that pretty much sums Cal up in a nutshell. He was always ahead of the curve. He didn’t follow trends, he set them.

Cal used to say, “Dreams aren’t just ideas, Harp. They’re maps.”

If you want to know the truth, sometimes it feels stupid trying to put into words how important music was to me back then. But when I was a kid, music was all I had. It was my voice, my only real mode of communication. And until Cal Callahan came into my life, it was my only friend.

And what did I give music in return?

Nothing.

I betrayed it.

Like I betrayed Cal.

Like I betrayed October.

Here’s the thing: I knew that reading the e-mail from the Thomas Fraser Gallery announcing October’s upcoming Living Exhibit would get me to thinking. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say it got me to feeling.

Four times out of five, I deleted e-mails that had anything to do with October or the gallery, but for some reason I didn’t delete this one.

Consequently, I knew about Sorrow.

I knew I could see her. I could talk to her. I could explain why I left that night, why I disappeared without saying goodbye, and she wouldn’t be able to talk back, order me to leave, call me a coward, or tell me how badly I hurt her.

Or I could do what I’d spent my life doing: nothing.

I was at a crossroads. And while finding myself at a crossroads was not new to me, I’d gone the wrong way at almost every turn.

The road less traveled? That had never been the road on which I’d walked. And if it’s true that fortune favors the brave, my life, up until that point, was a testament to the fact that the opposite is true as well.

Misfortune favors the spineless.

You know what October said to me once when I was feeling down on myself? We’d just hiked to Stinson Beach and were sitting on a piece of driftwood, eating vanilla soft-serve cones, and out of nowhere the feeling hit me—it’s a feeling that overcomes me sometimes, a voice that tells me I’m not good enough, that I’ll never be good enough—and as October’s fingers played connect-the-dots with the freckles on my forearm, her perspicacity kicked in and she said, “You know, it’s never too late to be the person you really are, Joe.”

I didn’t say anything, but what I thought was: Yeah, well, who the fuck is that?

As I zipped up my backpack and stumbled toward the library’s exit, I thanked Patty for her patience. She said, “You’re not going to drive, are you?”

I shook my head and promised her that I intended to sit in my truck and think for a while.