“I hate to pull this card, but this hearing is really important. You need to eat, and you need to sleep. Think about what this could mean.”

Niente.

“Think about Woodward and Bernstein. ‘Andy and June.’ This could be . . . Well, I don’t know if it’s life or death, but . . .”

Bubkes.

He sighed deeply, his eyes roving over the objects in their hotel room. Her open bag with clothes strewn out of it like a volcano had erupted, his suit for tomorrow hung neatly in the hall closet, and then there was the minibar. He felt an intense urge to tear into that minibar. An urge more intense than he had felt in a long, long time.

“You know, I never told you why I stopped drinking.”

Silence.

He leaned his head back against the wall. “So Stephen King describes his alcoholic self as a fun drunk. The kind of guy you’d love at parties, and that was me. And the thing about being nice and functional and likable when you’re drunk is it makes it a lot easier to justify your behavior. But that wasn’t true 100 percent of the time because no one is in a good mood 100 percent of the time.

“You’re my first relationship since I got sober. I’ve had flings, but no commitments. It’s not allowed when you’re in recovery. But I was in a long-term one before that. We were together for three years, and I assumed we always would be. I knew my drinking made her uncomfortable, and by that point, we’d fought about it a couple of times, but I was the Stephen King drunk. I’d never really suffered a tangible consequence. I put the ‘fun’ in ‘functional alcoholic.’

“And then one night, I was angry, like about the Democratic primaries, of all things. I’d gotten in an argument with a coworker earlier that day and carried it home. But it escalated and started to bleed into other issues we’d been having. And I got angry. And then I got violent.”

He ran his fingers over the knuckles of his right hand. “You know, the funny thing about drywall is you really have no idea how brittle it is until you punch right through it. I don’t remember a lot from that night, but I do remember the look in her eyes when I did it. And then she left.