“Community college. Turned out that I didn’t have the money for much more at that point, and my dad knew that, so he’d applied for me. I was probably the most resentful kid on that campus my first semester. I took a journalism class on a whim, and I’ve never looked back.”

“How did your parents feel about your career choice?” I am always careful with the tenses, not wanting to sting anyone with an assumption that loved ones are living.

“They were just happy I’d stopped complaining about being stuck in our town. But the thing is, I wasn’t all that angry at our town. It just didn’t give me a way to see how I was going to fit into the world.”

“And of all the ways to be a journalist, you chose war reporting.”

“Did I mention I come from a sleepy little town?” he asks with his voice lowered.

“And how does it feel when you go back to your sleepy little town?” I ask.

Clay’s smile fades. He runs his thumb along the edge of his foldout tray.

“The first time I went back,” he begins, without looking my way, “I felt like I was walking onto a movie set. Everything looked so perfectly arranged. There was the grocery store with thirty different kinds of cereal, the boxes lined up perfectly on the shelves. A big yellow school bus stopped in front of our home at twenty minutes past seven in the morning, five days a week. People stopped at red lights and let moms with strollers cross the street. Sure, unexpected things happened here and there, but they were the kinds of unexpected things you expected to see. Someone died of pneumonia. A foreclosure sign went up on a house. And people . . . people just went bowling on Saturday nights and talked about the weather and walked their dogs.”

I watch his hands as he talks, glad that we’re sitting shoulder to shoulder instead of face to face.

“I’d seen too much while I was over there,” he continues. “Home felt plastic, like a toy fresh out of its box.”

“You’re not the only one drawn to the thing that keeps you up at night,” I say.

Clay chews his lower lip.

“But it can’t go on like this. There’s got to be a reset button,” he says.

“If you found one, would you push it?” I ask.

Sitting next to Clay, I pick up a faint scent—a warm blend of teak, nutmeg, and apple. I become self-conscious that I’ve noticed and shift in my seat, trying to add an inch to the space between us. The scent is subtle, though, and doesn’t cause my head to squeeze the way Adam’s cologne often did. Clay’s too busy digging for an answer to my question to notice my fidgeting.