After Christopher cleans the mess in the bathroom, he arranges Shane on the bed and places two folded towels under the wounds in the back of his head. He frisks the pockets of Shane’s puffy coat and finds his iPhone, the earbuds, and, most surprisingly, a knot of several twenties secured with a rubberband. He dons Shane’s Boston Red Sox cap, gathers his things, leaves the hotel, hails a cab, and heads across town to Penn Station, where he takes Amtrak north to Burlington, Vermont, foregoing the play at the Atlantic Theater.

On the train he discovers that Shane’s iPhone doesn’t require a security code and he scrolls through all of Shane’s contacts and looks at photos of his son and girlfriend and listens to a playlist of Shane’s favorite rap songs.

Back home in Burlington he has Thanksgiving dinner with his mother and tells her about his early weeks at Yale, where he is especially enjoying a Creative Writing class.

He also likes his Statistics seminar and he may have a crush on a girl who he keeps running into at the library. His mother is so glad he’s decided to come home—she’s terribly lonely as it turns out—and before he leaves he gives her the Statue of Liberty paperweight, which he was sure to thoroughly scrub with soap and water. His mother is so moved by the gift she cries, and cries, and cries. She’s never been to New York City, after all. She’s only dreamed of it.

When Christopher returns to New Haven he doesn’t attend his classes, but, rather, tracks down Shane’s girlfriend, Kimmy, who works at the local grocery store as a checkout clerk. He approaches her register with a quart of milk and introduces himself and asks her to coffee. He finds the brown-eyed brunette with the tired smile to be hauntingly attractive.

Kimmy agrees to meet him and over coffee they quickly connect and she tells Christopher about her missing boyfriend, Shane, whom she believes ran away.

BELLA

“I know he ain’t never comin’ back,”

CHRISTOPHER

She tells Christopher when he walks her home.

BELLA

“that boy never had no business bein’ a father.”

CHRISTOPHER

Before they say good night they exchange phone numbers.

Christopher and Kimmy see each other several more times, and within a month, Christopher has moved his few belongings out of campus housing and into the basement of Kimmy’s mother’s house, where he helps them raise Shane’s infant son—

BELLA

Whose name happens to be Billy.

CHRISTOPHER

A week later, they leave Billy with Kimmy’s mother while they attend a show at a Yale University student art gallery—

BELLA

Where Christopher is drawn to a twenty-by-twenty painting of a man lying facedown in a snowy field. The figure in the painting is described as wearing a jacket that’s quote—“too thin for the weather”—unquote.

CHRISTOPHER

Shane’s disappearance never resurfaces and at the apparent height of Christopher’s state of well-being and domestic bliss, in the middle of a snowy night, he walks out of Kimmy’s mother’s house.