We decided to take opposite routes from the city, so I follow traffic south toward the highway that cuts through Washington, past the fish market that’s still there at the waterside. I wonder where the fish come from. Maine? North Carolina? Probably both. I don’t wonder who works in the processing factories, gutting and scaling, packing and freezing. Maybe one day, I’ll have a job doing the same. Long hours. No pay. Permanent stench of fish in my skin.

Lin was wrong about the economy falling apart. It might not be thriving, but the machine chugs along at a constant, working speed. Our workforce wasn’t cut in half, only reassembled and redistributed. Men who performed unskilled labor were replaced with whoever the Pure deemed unworthy of hanging about in society. Industries—and that all-encompassing industry, government—cherry-picked freshly graduated males from the country’s top universities to fill the gaps women left: CEOs, doctors, lawyers, engineers.

It was an eminently doable reworking of the system.

I’ve been pushing Steven out of my mind all day, and now the sadness uncorks itself and spills out of me. There were so many times I wanted to blame him, but I can’t. Monsters aren’t born, ever. They’re made, piece by piece and limb by limb, artificial creations of madmen who, like the misguided Frankenstein, always think they know better.

He won’t get far, anyway, even with the cash. Steven will find his way back home. This is one thing I have to believe.

The traffic subsides at the same time my tears run out, just as I pull the Honda onto the exit ramp and turn eastward toward the Chesapeake Bay, that land of William Styron and blue crabs and sailboats skimming over calm waters. It’s a long drive, but a quiet one, and it gives me time to think.

If the Wernicke cure works, which I expect it will, I’ll ask Morgan to have a dose sent to my mother in the Italian hospital. That small benefit is a single bright ray of sun in an otherwise drab landscape. Not much, but it’s something to hold on to.

Lorenzo’s car sits in the driveway of the shack, radiating distorting waves of heat from its hood. Of course he’s arrived first—you can take the mad Italian driver out of Italy, but you can’t take the madness out of him. I drive past it, up to the next lot, which has stood vacant since the time Lorenzo rented our place. The rule is, first one arriving parks at the shack; second, in the empty lot. I’ve never been first.

He’s in the kitchen, or what would be a kitchen if it contained more than a sink, a two-burner stove, and a cube-shaped refrigerator for water and wine. We never wasted time cooking in this place. Not food, anyway.