The very evening he first talked to his brother about Angie, she showed up at his door with take-out Korean food. He tossed the bag onto the table and drew her into the bedroom and onto the bed. If he was going to be out-maneuvered he might as well enjoy it. Surrender with grace and dignity; hand over the keys to the castle. So he said the words: I’m falling in love with you. It was surprisingly easy, even liberating, but her response was nowhere near anything he had imagined.

He remembered her turning and stretching beneath him, the weight of her, the heat, the way she caught her breath and let it go. The smile at the corner of her mouth, banished before it could blossom. She flexed around him, and he gasped, too.

Good, she had said solemnly. Good.

Thinking it over later, he had laughed out loud, in relief and acceptance. The next day on the phone Rob said, You’ve met your match.

As he walked across campus in the humid dark, all these memories came rushing back, bright and clear and detailed. As if the five years they had spent apart had never happened; as if that weekend on Long Island had been nothing but a very vivid, very unpleasant dream. He remembered his grandfather at the head of the table staring at Angie, bristling with displeasure. Heart failure had turned his lips and fingernails as blue as her hair.

Now was not the time to allow Matthew Grant out of his grave. John didn’t want to have to deal with that rasping, wavering voice, so he thought of Angie, not as she had been that disastrous Long Island weekend, but as she was Saturday night in the fluorescent glare of the emergency room lights, the smile she had given him, sweet and sorrowful and hopeful all at once.

He looked up to find himself in front of Ivy House. There was a light on in the parlor, which might mean she was sleepless and worried or maybe she was in there watching sci-fi with Rivera, the two of them stretched out on the floor discussing camera angles and lighting and dialogue.

But it was Tony Russo who answered his quiet knock; Tony with his trademark cynical smile, his eyes a little glassy. There was rockabilly coming over the speakers and the smell of grass in the air.

“Hey,” Tony said. “Here for Angie?”

That woke John out of his trance. Tony and everyone else in Ogilvie outside his own immediate family thought of him as a man about to get married—a man as good as married, to a woman who happened to be out of town. And here he was looking for Angie.