The terms of employment were attractive, she said: A private carriage house off the main house, all expenses paid; use of a car and a weekly salary. The work was mostly nights and weekends; no lifting or physical care. The professor was fully employed during the day. It sounded like something out of a Jane Austen novel.

“Then I met Alzy,” Becky said. “That was it. You know how she was.”

Yes, I knew how she was. Alzy made everything look easy. She fought for poor single moms, her writing and advocacy meant to expose the subtle ways in which even well-intentioned media painted them as the architects of their own disaster. She worked around the clock. When she was literally sick with exhaustion, three shots of vodka taken rapidly perked her up. Impeccable and composed, Alzy would have starter cocktails over lunch with colleagues, drinks with influential friends for dinner, and afterward continue with folks in bars until closing time. Despite all her accomplishments, however, Alzy had the warm heart and politician’s timing of a Hodge. When she sat down with you, it wasn’t just looking at her, how beautiful she was, her ringleted blond hair from Mal’s side of the family and the soft but sturdy dancer’s figure she inherited from Alma, like Erhart’s Mary Magdalene carved from linden wood, it was also the way she treated you. She would get so enthused about whatever you were doing that you would feel as if you’d just lost twenty pounds and defended your thesis. Becky said, “An old friend of hers told me once that he was burned out by his research into synesthesia when Alzy said, what if there was a restaurant in Paris where all the chefs could see taste in their minds, so that the color yellow tasted like braised carrots and the color purple tasted like plums?”

The guy ended up finishing his degree but also writing a novel about that restaurant.

So why would such a woman, accomplished and adept, loved and lauded, already in possession of all the gifts life could offer to the body and the spirit, trade those blessings for a couple of inches of firepower at the bottom of a glass with a twist of lime? Why would she do that, with not a single hint of any addiction in her ancestry, to the tip of the last branch of the family tree?

As Rebecca posed those questions, I thought to myself, indeed...why would Stefan?

I let my eyes slide over to him then, and I saw that he was already looking at me, looking at me as if my skull were made of window glass and he could read every thought on my brain. He knew the answer. There was no clear answer. There was no dot-to-dot that, traced, would set forth a clear route that could be studied, understood and avoided.