Maybe he was right. Certainly, Julie was right when she said that a crisis was by its nature an event of deepest challenge bracketed in time. What was a crisis that kept unrolling?

I caught myself striding around in front of my desk, unable to perch longer than the interval it took to write a sentence. I had received a modest contract for my book about obsessed women in fiction, now titled The Haunted Lady. My editor, who’d worked on my previous book, Sad-Eyed Lady, was effusive.

“I hope our Tess is among your subjects,” she said, referring to Thomas Hardy’s ill-used heroine—a murderer, no less, from the he-had-it-coming school of fallen women.

“She is indeed,” I told her. “I’ll be including her. All of the greats.”

“You have such an engaging style, I can’t wait to read the finished manuscript.”

A few days later, I signed on the line. The advance was a chuckle, about what it would cost to spend on a weekend at a great hotel, but I had just paid off my car, now six years old, and the last of the radioactive credit card bills, and money still seemed to vanish like water into sand.

I thought of Pete Sunday it seemed all the time now. I wanted to contact him again, but what would I say?

This was a busy time for Jep. The season was in full swing, and Stefan had fallen into a somewhat busy routine, with his landscaping contracts and keeping The Healing Project going forward. Any commotion stirred by the public television episode seemed to have died down for now. Whether it had garnered the kind of attention he had been looking for remained an open question.

“Are you feeling good?” I asked Stefan.

“What you mean is, am I feeling suicidal? I’m not feeling suicidal. I’m feeling tired. Ordinary tired, Mom. The way people get who work all the time.”

Finally, one day, I forced myself to go outside for a long walk with Julie. A new dusting of pristine snow refreshed the evil-looking plowed-up foothills that sat behind stores and dumpsters. Swaddled in fleece, we were powering to Lava Java when Julie said, “Thea, you’re miles away. When I say you look like shit, I don’t mean you’ve lost too much weight, although you have. I mean, you look weary.”

“I never thought I would mind hearing I’d lost too much weight.”