Look Closer

41

Tuesday, October 18, 2022

This could be trouble, this problem. What am I going to do?

It matters a lot to me, Lauren. I can’t do that to Vicky. I can tell her, yes. I can tell her tonight, when she gets home, that I’ve met you, that I’m going to get a divorce and marry you. But I can’t file for divorce before November 3. I can’t file before our tenth anniversary. If I do, she’ll be cut off from the trust money.

I told you that, all of that. “I’ll tell Vicky tonight,” I said. “I’ll move out of the house and get another place. We can move in together right now. I just can’t file for divorce yet. It’s less than a month away. What difference does a month make?”

“She has no right to that money,” you said. “You inherited it from your father. It’s your money. She doesn’t deserve it.”

“‘Deserve it’? We’ve been married for almost ten years.”

“And why do you think that is?” you said. “Do you not see it, Simon?”

I didn’t catch your meaning. Or maybe I didn’t want to.

You paused, like you were searching for words. Then you breathed out like you were done sugarcoating it.

“You two aren’t in love and you never were,” you said.

I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. “That’s not true.”

“She never loved you, Simon. She needed someone to take care of her. And you did. And now she’s eyeballing that trust money that’s so close she can taste it. She’s put in nine years and eleven months.”

I stepped back, almost falling over the bed. “You make it sound like a prison sentence.”

You walked over and took my hands. “You deserve so much better,” you said. “You want to do right by Vicky, then fine. Pay her alimony off your professor’s salary. But don’t give her millions of dollars. That’s your money.”

You kissed me, first softly then deeply, my internal thermometer ratcheting up. “You mean our money,” I said.

“You know I don’t care about the money,” you whispered, reaching for my belt buckle.

“I know.”

You dropped to your knees and worked the zipper on my pants.

“Promise me you’ll file now,” you said.

42 Simon

I decide to go for a run in the morning, a version of my Five at Five that I’ve abandoned since I started running at nights from the law school to Wicker Park. I miss jogging on the west side of Chicago, but today is not the day to make up for that. This morning, I run instead the other direction, west from my house, toward Grace Village. Toward Lauren’s house.

I’ve driven my car over there in the mornings enough. If I am too regular in doing so, one of those nosy neighbors might start to notice. That’s the last thing I need.

I drove over here yesterday morning and parked down the street from Lauren’s house, arriving at 5:30 a.m. It was the first time in a few weeks.

I was waiting for Conrad’s town car to pick him up at six sharp and drive down to the East Bank Club for his morning workout. But no town car ever came.

Now here I am, jogging up, down, and near Lathrow Avenue, crossing streets, switching directions, trying not to stand out as the sun begins to show its face on a Friday morning, as five-thirty becomes five-forty-five, as five-fifty becomes six o’clock, as six o’clock becomes ten after six.

Once again, no town car arrives to pick up Conrad Betancourt.

Maybe he’s out of town on business or took a long weekend with some buddies. Maybe that’s it.

Where’d you go, Conrad?

I stop a half block down from Lauren’s house and look back at it. It’s not too late, I tell myself yet again. It’s not too late to put the brakes on everything and just forget that I ever saw Lauren on Michigan Avenue last May. God, it feels like so much more than five months ago that she re-entered my life. Maybe that’s because, to me, she never really left.

“I hear someone has a big birthday coming up,” Lauren whispered in my ear, the smell of beer on her breath, more than nineteen years ago. Times were good that summer at my dad’s law firm, after Teddy had scored that enormous settlement in the electrical-injury case and the place was flush with cash. Happy hours every Friday night. I never stayed long; I usually went straight home after work and spent the evenings with my mother, who by then was in a wheelchair and spent her days at home with her caregiver, Edie.

But my father always let me have one beer, despite my being seventeen, his way of showing me the cool-parent thing, and the happy hours always started at four o’clock, so I usually hung around for the first hour before taking the Green Line home.

Lauren had been nice to me that first month of the summer, joking and complimentary and maybe, in hindsight, even flirtatious. But I hadn’t thought much of it, as I was the boss’s son, and pretty much everyone treated me with kid gloves—a lot more pleases and thank-yous when I dropped off a package or delivered a message than the other staffers presumably received.

But that night, that last Friday in June, Lauren looked at me differently. A couple of beers down and the atmosphere loose, she smiled at me in a way that made me feel like an adult for the first time in my life.

“I have a present for you,” she whispered.

I’d never been with a woman. My experience to date had been a few awkward kisses my junior and senior years of high school, a couple of painful dates that left me feeling inadequate and anxious.

I met her that Sunday, at her house in Old Irving Park, at 3:00 p.m. I got there early, parking my mother’s Honda along Kedvale, nervous and tense. The truth was, I was dreading it. I was scared, not aroused. Queasy, not excited. I wanted to turn the car around and drive back to Grace Park before I had the chance to disappoint her.

Lauren, who was twenty at the time, still lived with her parents in a humble, brick A-frame house north of Waveland. The parents were gone, or so I assumed. She never mentioned them one way or the other. She answered the door in a button-down shirt and bare legs.

“Hello, birthday boy,” she said to me.

In any other context, I would’ve been so aroused. This was the stuff of my fantasies, a woman who could be pinned up on my bedroom wall seducing me—me!—but I was feeling limp in every sense of the word, wilting under the pressure.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said, making a stark appraisal of my reaction. She took me by the hand and led me through her house, a small kitchen with dishes in the sink, a radiator with peeling paint, a bowl of kibble, and cat litter. It calmed me. Seeing the mundane in her life brought her back to earth, or at least that’s where I tried to maintain my focus.

Once inside her bedroom, she made it so easy. I had no context, other than the occasional foray into internet porn or sex scenes from movies, where everyone is so smooth and confident.

She took it slow, drawing close to me, letting me smell her perfume, gently brushing her lips against my neck, running her hands up the sides of my legs. She started swaying, though there was no music, humming something I didn’t recognize.

She turned around, pressing her buttocks against my crotch, her head against my shoulder, as I silently begged for an erection, to get past the nerves and get into the moment. She took my hands and cupped them around her breasts and moaned.

“You feel good,” she whispered.

Then my hands took on a life of their own, squeezing her breasts, cupping her neck, running through her hair, pressing against her silk panties.

And then, batter up, I was in the moment. She had helped me get there, had guided me through the first curves and turns, and now I was ready to take the wheel.

I wish I could say that Lauren enjoyed hours of ecstasy. My best estimate is that it was four minutes—and that was with me trying hard to hold it in—and I’m not sure any particular moment would have qualified to her as ecstatic. I didn’t have any idea how long I was supposed to hold out, not the slightest concept of how to bring a member of the female species to orgasm.

But she made me feel like she’d had the time of her life. She wrapped her legs around my back and held me there, afterward, for a long time.

“I like feeling you inside me,” she whispered.

The truth, I was more relieved than anything.

She brought in a couple of beers and we drank them and talked on her bed. I was a few months away from college, and she told me she was saving up so she could afford college, too. We talked about music, about baseball, and one beer became another. That was one more beer than I’d ever drunk, but the buzz from my first sexual encounter was far more intoxication than any alcohol could provide.

We were standing by her dresser, looking at pictures of her from high school, when she looked at the clock on the wall. “My parents will be home in about an hour,” she said. “Sometimes they come home a little early.”

“So the birthday boy should probably get going,” I said.

“Mmm.” She put her hands on my chest. “You’re not a boy, you’re a man,” she said. “So how ’bout you fuck me one more time before you leave?”

She sure knew how to punch my buttons.

And now, here we are, nineteen years later. I am rapidly approaching that cliff. It’s not too late to turn back. That’s the beauty of it; until I jump, I can always change my mind.

My life has been okay. I put myself together and moved on. I can keep that life, nice and safe, more or less, boring and uneventful, maybe, but meaningful to me. As long as I can still teach, even if I’m run out of my law school by Dean Comstock—I can find some school, prestigious or not, it won’t matter as long as I can still teach and talk and write about the law.

If I take the plunge, I don’t know where I will land. It might be the biggest mistake of my life. It could well be the end of me.

43 Vicky

I sit in a high-back chair outside the ballroom at the Peninsula Hotel, where inside, eight hundred of the wealthiest people in Chicago mingle and play casino games to raise money for autism awareness. I am not dressed for a night like this and have no invitation, but I wore a dress, anyway, to generally fit in.

In my lap is my phone, in my ears, AirPods. I look like I’m watching something on my phone. I am not. The screen is blank. But the words from inside the Gold Coast Room come through the AirPods with decent clarity:

He: “So are you staying here tonight?”

She: “No. Are you?”

He: “I have a suite.”

She: “I see. And why are you telling me that?”

He: “Uh-oh. Am I being inappropriate?”

She: “You tell me. Tell me what you’re thinking right now.”

He: “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

She: “Why not?”

He: “I might get my face slapped.”

A pause.

She: “You think I’d slap you in the face.”

He: “Or maybe my wife would, if she heard me.”

Well done. A test. He’s cautious. He dips his toe in and gives her openings but allows himself an easy retreat.

She: “Well, then, I guess it’s a good thing your wife’s not here tonight.”

Seventy-five minutes later. Quicker than I expected. The sound is better inside the hotel room than in the ballroom, far less noise and interference. His moaning is annoying but helpful.

He: “You are just . . . full of surprises.”

She: “Do you like that?”

He: “I like that . . . I like that a lot.”

She: “Does your wife do this for you, Paul?”

He: “My wife? Give me a break. She just lies there like a sack of potatoes. I have to check her for a pulse.”

They laugh.

Melanie comes down the stairs over an hour later, past midnight, wearing her dress from the night, a small jacket over her shoulders. I know Mel from our days in the “entertainment” business, which she has yet to leave, though she’s going to school for a degree in sociology. I hope she completes it and gets out of this business. You can tell yourself whatever you need to tell yourself to get through the nights, but you can’t survive this work for very long.

I hand her an envelope. She opens it and counts the money. “This is more than we discussed,” she says. “This is too much.”

“Consider it a bonus. You got some good stuff in there.”

“Yeah, well, he doesn’t like his wife, does he?”

She unpins the crystal brooch from her dress and hands it to me. “Pretty sure we captured the whole thing on here,” she says. “If you use it, you’ll black out my face?”

“Of course, Mel. And I don’t think it will ever come to that, anyway.”

I give her a hug and we say our goodbyes. “Get that degree,” I say to her. “Promise.”

“I promise. I’m about two semesters away.” She looks around and leans in to whisper in my ear. “So what did this guy do, anyway, to piss you off?”

44 Christian

Vicky lies on me, twisting her finger in and out of my chest hair, thinking about something, though I don’t know what. She keeps her thoughts to herself, and I’m too cautious to push too hard lest I push her away.

I guess I don’t need to know if I’m anything more to Vicky than a financial whiz who also happens to be easy on the eyes and terrific in bed. Gavin is right. All that matters is that money. I need to keep my eye on the prize, a prize that is less than a month away now.

But the closer November 3 gets, the more I worry, like a pitcher throwing a no-hitter who’s just rolling along doing his thing, but now it’s the ninth inning, and the prize is in sight, and you feel yourself tightening up.

“What was it with you and Simon’s father?” I ask, because the whole thing with Theodore Dobias is something I should understand better. If Simon Dobias can be pushed as far as murder, I should probably know that before I help Vicky steal all his money, yes?

“Well, he obviously thought I wanted Simon for his money. Maybe it was personal to me, or maybe that’s just how he felt, generally, about women.”

“Maybe he didn’t trust Simon.”

“Oh, that’s definitely part of it. Simon . . .” She puts her chin on my chest and looks at me. “You look at Simon, he’s a nice-looking man, he can be charming and funny, but he never really had many good relationships with women before he met me. As far as I know, he only had one real girlfriend, back when he was like eighteen, this woman named Lauren who broke his heart. That was right around the time his mother died, and his world kind of crashed after that.”

“Oh, when did his mother die?” I ask, playing dumb.

“Well, it’s a whole story,” says Vicky. “Simon’s mother—Glory was her name—Glory was a law professor like Simon ended up. Anyway, she had a stroke that put her in a wheelchair and took away a lot of her mental capabilities and basically ended her career. Simon’s dad, Teddy—Teddy was making good money then and he started living this sort of swinger-bachelor lifestyle. He cheated on his wife. Simon caught him.”

“He caught him?”

“Yeah. Walked in on him. Teddy was having sex with this woman in his office, and Simon walked right in and saw it.”

“Harsh.”

“Yeah, harsh. And doubly harsh because Simon idolized his mother. He couldn’t bear to tell her what Teddy was doing. So he kept it quiet. And pretty soon, Teddy ended up blowing all his money and didn’t have the finances to take care of Glory, to pay for in-home care. Long story short, he wanted to put Glory in a nursing home, Simon freaked out, and right around then, Glory swallowed a bottleful of pain meds.” She looks at me. “Glad you asked?”

“So after blowing all his money on women, Teddy didn’t want Simon doing the same thing? And that’s why he put that language in the trust?”

“I guess so.”

“So what happened to Teddy?”

She looks at me for a long time.

I didn’t phrase that question well. What happened to Teddy? I should have been more generic, like What happened after Glory died? Did Simon ever make peace with his father? Something that doesn’t hint that I know that someone stuck a knife in Teddy.

Do better, Nicky. Stay on your game.

But then I realize that Vicky isn’t wondering why I would ask that question, or if I already knew something. She’s deciding how much to tell me. She’s deciding how much to let me into her life.

“Teddy, believe it or not, was murdered,” Vicky says. “He was living in St. Louis by then, and someone stabbed him and pushed him into his pool.”

“Whoa,” I say. “Who stabbed him?”

Her eyes trail off. “They never found out. They looked at Simon as a suspect, but Simon was up in Chicago taking final exams at U of C. It would have been very hard for him to have pulled that off.”

Very hard but not impossible. In fact, that would kinda be the beauty of it.

“What are you thinking?” she asks me.

I snap out of my trance. “Nothing.”

“You’re wondering whether Simon killed Teddy.”

“No, I mean—”

“You’re wondering whether I did.”

“God, no,” I say. “Of course not.”

But of course, I am.

“I’m just worried about you,” I say. “If you and Simon get into a fight over this trust money, and he’s capable of something like violence—”

“So you do think he did it.”

“Hey.” I pull her up to me so we’re face-to-face. “I’ve never met the guy. I have no idea what he’s capable of. You tell me he didn’t do it, then he didn’t do it. I just want you to be careful. You are what matters to me. You’re my long-term investment.”

“Ahh . . .” Vicky reaches down between my legs. “All this talk of violence and murder got you worked up.”

God, this woman knows me well, which is pretty impressive, considering my entire identity is a lie.

She straddles me, and I slide into her, thrusting upward. Vicky moans in response. It’s been an hour since our last time, so I have some staying power. I’ll take her for a good long ride.

She goes off into that faraway place of hers, then leans forward, her arms taut on each side of me. Her face close to mine. Her jaw clenched.

She opens her eyes and slows things down to a gentle rhythm. She leans forward, nose to nose, and whispers to me.

“Simon did it. He killed his father. I didn’t try to stop him. And I married him anyway. I married him for his money. So now you know. Now’s your chance to run as far away as you can.”

I thrust upward, Vicky bobbing, closing her eyes in response.

“I’m not . . . running away,” I say.

“You don’t know me,” she says, eyes still closed, her head turned away. “You can’t trust me.”

“I know you. I trust you.” Running my hands over her body, picking up speed, the heat rising within me.

“Nobody’s . . . ever . . . trusted me,” she says, breathing hard, head leaned back.

I’ve never come so hard in my life.

45

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

“You didn’t tell her,” you said, reading my face when you opened the door.

“It’s . . . not an easy conversation to have.”

“Have you made an appointment with that divorce lawyer?”

“I called him,” I said, but that was a lie, and I made that vow, I’d never lie to you, Lauren, so with my tail between my legs, I corrected the record. “I started to call but hung up. This isn’t easy, Lauren. C’mon.”

“You want me to ‘c’mon,’ like this is some casual thing? Are you committed to us or not?”

I am madly, desperately in love with you, Lauren. That is one thing that is not in doubt. But you have to know how hard this will be for Vicky. Why can’t you understand that? Why can’t you let me make this decision?

“I’m not going to be that woman,” you said. “I’m not going to nag at you and beg and plead and demand. If you don’t want to commit to me—”

“I’ll tell her tonight,” I promised.

And I will. Vicky will be home soon, and I’m going to tell her. God, this is going to be brutal. Oh, she’s home, she’s coming up the stairs right

46 Simon

I drop my green journal into my work bag as Vicky comes into my home office upstairs. “I thought I might find you here,” she says.

“You found me.”

She’s holding a laptop, carrying it like a book in school.

“I want you to look at something,” she says. “Don’t say a word until you’re finished.”

“Does your wife do this for you, Paul?” the woman on the video screen asks.

“My wife? Give me a break. She just lies there like a sack of potatoes. I have to check her for a pulse.”

“Okay, enough,” I say, hitting the “pause” button on the video, handing the laptop back to Vicky. “You promised me you wouldn’t do anything.”

“And I’ve kept my promise,” she says. “I haven’t done anything with it. He has no idea he was recorded. I leave that up to you.”

I run my fingers through my hair. “This is Paul Southern? Reid’s father?”

“The very one,” she says. “The man who’s bankrolling his idiot son all the way into a full professorship.”

“I wish you’d told me,” I say.

“You would’ve told me not to do it.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, so far, I haven’t done anything. All I did was load the gun. It’s up to you whether you pull the trigger.”

I drop my head into my hands. I should’ve figured she’d do something like this. “I take it you couldn’t find anything on Dean Comstock?”

“Nothing all that good.” She closes the laptop. “But I was thinking. If you go straight at Dean Cumstain, you have an archenemy on your hands. That’s not in your best interest. Why not go to the source, the one the dean is trying to please?”

“So, what—we show this to Paul and tell him to back me instead of his own son?”

She shrugs. “That’s exactly what we do.”

“Won’t that seem odd to the dean? Suddenly, Reid’s father says, Give the promotion to the other guy?”

“Who cares what seems odd?” she says. “You know all this money Paul Southern has—it didn’t come from his own blood, sweat, and tears. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“He married into it. His wife inherited a fortune, and the company. Paul’s the CEO, but he’s beholden to her.” She pats the laptop. “How do you think wifey’s gonna feel about what her husband said about her, much less what he was doing?”

“She wouldn’t like it. If she ever saw this video, which she won’t.”

“Of course she won’t. Paul would never let that happen. He’d be out on his ass.”

“Paul is never going to see this video, either, Vicky. I’m not going to use this.”

I look up at her. She looks down on me like a disapproving parent. Which is kind of ironic, because I’m the one trying to take the high road here.

“This isn’t Paul Southern’s fault,” I say. “He’s just trying to help his son. I don’t like it, but he’s not malicious. He doesn’t deserve this.”

“Yeah, I feel real sorry for Paul. He seems like a great guy!” That sarcastic look, that faux cheerfulness.

This is one of the ways where Vicky and I differ. I may push back when people do things to me, but I don’t generally distrust people. Vicky, she made her way through life being used by other people, mostly men, so she basically starts with the opposite presumption, that everyone deserves a good kick in the shin until proven otherwise. She would look at Paul as someone who had it coming, even if he never personally did anything to us.

“You’re letting them push you around,” she says.

“Hey, I applied, didn’t I? You have to give me that much.”

“I do, yes. But now the dean’s going to steamroll you if you don’t protect yourself. Why won’t you let me help you do that?”

Because I don’t want anything else in my life to taint my job.

Because I’ve let my life be controlled by what others have done, and my inexplicable need to settle the score, and okay, inside my own internal courtroom, I make the rules, I am judge, jury, and prosecutor, fine, but that’s my fucked-up internal world, not my job.

Because what I love about the law is its purity, its honesty, its search for justice and fairness.

Because I love teaching the tools of that craft, honing minds, showing them the majesty of the law at its zenith.

Because I won’t let anything contaminate that.

That’s why.

Most people would laugh at me if I said these things aloud. Vicky would not. She would appreciate them. But I don’t need to speak those words. She already knows. She understands me.

I come out of my fog and look up at her. She has her hand out, like she’s raising it for attention but isn’t into the whole arm-raising thing.

The first time I met Vicky, she raised her hand just like that. We were in SOS, her first time, a girl in a tank top and shorts and baseball cap sitting in the back row, and after several other people had spoken, as the session seemed to be dying down, she raised her hand just like that, not even shoulder level, showing me her palm, a look on her face like she didn’t really like having to be called on.

“My sister committed suicide six weeks ago,” she said. “I’ve been listening to everyone talk about how guilty they feel. Am I the only one who’s fucking pissed off?”

Everyone laughed and started clapping, appreciating the release in the tension, her blunt acknowledgment of an emotion most of us survivors experience. That was the moment I fell in love with her. That’s the moment I realized I’d do anything for her.

“Never mind,” she says to me now. “It was a bad idea. I won’t mention it again.”

The reason I still love Vicky, oddly enough, is that what I have to offer her is not enough. After the life she led, having to do unspeakable things to survive, you’d think it would be enough to have a man who loves you, who thinks the world of you, who will treat you with respect, who will care for you, who will give you anything you want. I check every one of those boxes.

But through all of that, she has demanded more. She wants to be in love. She wants the fairy tale. And no matter what other feelings she may have toward me, I can’t give her that.

That’s why she’ll leave me. She’s never said so explicitly, but I know it. She’ll leave in November.

47

Thursday, October 20, 2022

When I walked through the door this afternoon, you stood there, a distance apart, waiting for what I had to say.

“I saw the divorce lawyer today,” I told you.

You nodded. “Did you tell Vicky?”

“I did not. But I will.”

“When?”

“Before I file,” I said. “Which will be after November 3. I can’t cut Vicky out of the money, Lauren. I can’t do that to her. I won’t.”

Your face went cold. “I see,” you whispered. You didn’t seem all that surprised.

“What you have to decide,” I said, “is whether you can respect my decision. I hope you can. But that’s my decision, and it’s final.”

We can get past this, right? You’ll come to understand. This is where you’re supposed to say, That’s one of the reasons I love you, Simon, that you’d want to make sure you take care of Vicky before saying goodbye to her.

But all you said was “I need time to think. I need the weekend.”

That didn’t sound like a good sign.

48 Simon

Friday night. Most people would be spending time with their family or blowing off steam over a couple drinks with friends. Me, I’m in my office at the law school, finishing up a blog post on a case involving a Title III intercept from the Ninth Circuit that is before the U.S. Supreme Court this session.

I have the house to myself this weekend, as Vicky is off to Elm Grove again to spend time with her nieces. So I work later than usual, until after eight o’clock, before starting my routine run from the law school to Wicker Park. To the alley outside Viva Mediterránea. To the alley behind Christian Newsome’s condo.

I suit up, leaving my blue jeans and button-down hanging on the back of my office door, throwing on running pants and shoes, a high-neck top with ski cap. The temps are in the mid-forties with no precipitation, perfect running conditions, if you discount the occasional difficulties navigating these populated city streets in the dark.

Viva’s patio is almost vacant, despite the heat lamps blowing and the city allowing restaurants to keep their outside areas open late into the year. Only a handful of people are braving the elements, drinking cocktails in their heavy coats.

Usually, I make sure I reach the alley in Wicker Park by 8:00 p.m. for the nightly text messages. But we don’t text on Friday nights or the weekends. The phones stay off from Friday morning to Monday morning. I’m not here for texting.

No, I just wanted to get a good look at Christian’s place.

The front of his building on Winchester is fenced, but it’s not a security gate, just something to keep the dogs away from the small garden out front. Up the stairs is the front door, a secured door with a buzzer. In the alley are the garages. Christian’s garage is third from the end, directly beneath his condo. The garage is controlled by an automatic door, like most are, which is surprisingly secure.

Still, that’s the better point of entry. Certainly the less visible one, given the poorly lit alley. And unless you’re going in and out of that garage while patrons are out on Viva’s back patio, there aren’t likely to be too many people hanging around back there.

That’s how Vicky comes in when she visits. She doesn’t walk up to the front door, stand under a light, buzz, and take the stairs up. No, she enters in the shadows, through the garage, without having to ever see a neighbor.

What are you doing tonight, Christian, with Vicky away? Are you and your buddy Gavin out drinking and carousing?

Mind if I take a look around your condo?

Nah. Not tonight, at least. Maybe later.

49 Vicky

“It’s good you’re here. They like it when you’re here.” Adam hands me a glass of pinot as we watch his daughters, my nieces, Mariah and Macy, the M&Ms, finish up a game of one-on-one basketball in the driveway.

“I like it, too.” I zip up my coat to my chin. I just wish it wasn’t so cold.

“Still okay with moving in with us?”

“Still okay if you’re okay,” I say. “November. Maybe Thanksgiving-ish.” I look at Adam. He’s just hitting forty, with a hint of gray creeping in at the temples. Adam Tremont is the all-American boy, the thick head of hair and big smile, full of good cheer, someone who grew up with money and basically seemed to have life right where he wanted it. He and my sister, Monica, were the Perfect Couple, Barbie and Ken, handsome and charismatic, bubbling with energy and positive vibes. It was enough to make me puke most of the time, when I wasn’t busy resenting Monica for her good fortune.

Adam met Monica in college, at Madison, and swept her off her feet. In a good way. Adam is the real deal.

“Last night,” he says, “Macy asked me if she looked like Mommy.”

“She does,” I say. “Mariah more so. When Mariah was younger, she looked like you. But now that she’s growing up, that face? That’s Monica.”

“I know. It kinda freaks me out.”

Me, too. It can be shocking sometimes, to see the face of my sister again in her daughters, to be reminded of the woman I didn’t do enough to help.

I elbow him. “You getting out there at all?”

“Hm.” He finishes a sip of his wine and shakes his head. “You mean like dating?”

“I mean ‘like dating.’”

“Oh . . . a grand total of two dates. Nothing serious.”

Mariah, the elder at age thirteen, swats away a shot from Macy, three years younger. Macy claims that’s “no fair” because Mariah is older and taller.

“They’ll understand, y’know,” I tell him. “It might be a little weird or awkward, but they can handle it.”

“I’m not sure I can,” he says. “This online dating stuff? It’s freakin’ nuts. It’s not for me. If I ever do it, it’s gonna be the old-fashioned way.”

“A handsome, successful guy like you? I think you’ll be fine.”

“Not so sure about either of those things.”

I catch on that, take a swallow of wine. The Tremont family started a chain of microbreweries that did quite well. Adam, the only child, took over the business, more or less, about a decade ago, and things ran smoothly until the last few years, when COVID-19 hit and struck a massive blow to the business.

“The restaurant side is just now coming back,” he says. “Good thing for us we had the retail sales. One thing people didn’t stop doing during the pandemic was drink alcohol.”

“Money’s still tight?” I ask, as if I’m only moving along the conversation and not probing.

“Pretty tight, yeah. We closed another brewery last week.”

“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

He lets out a bitter chuckle. “If Monica were here, she’d be telling me to look forward, not back.”

Yep, that sounds like her. I’m glad he remembers her that way, because that was the Monica he met in college, the Monica with whom he fell in love, the Monica who was the mother to his children. Not the Monica who injured her back and started on OxyContin, who didn’t realize when she crossed that line from needing oxy for the pain to just needing oxy, period, who eventually did the unthinkable—unthinkable for Monica, at least—and walked away from her family for a man who was more than happy to keep supplying her with pain-killing opioids.

I, of all people, was Monica’s confidante, to the extent she let any of us know that she was falling into the grips of that poison, that it was slowly predominating over everything else in her life. Maybe it was because I’d been such a fuckup myself, the black sheep of the family, that she felt more comfortable sharing with me than Adam. I was three hundred miles away, so it was mostly by phone. I didn’t realize how warped her reality had become because I wasn’t there in person.

Or that’s what I try to tell myself, at least. I was the younger, screwup sister, talking and texting with her from a distance. She was the belle of our high school, the prom queen who went to college and married a handsome, wealthy guy and had two beautiful children. How seriously could she take advice from the high school dropout who’d never made a good decision in her life?

But I knew she was faltering. I could tell those drugs were messing with her judgment. I knew she needed someone to shake some sense into her.

Did I really help as much as I could have? Or was there a part of me that drew some satisfaction from seeing Ms. Perfect stumble from her perch?

“Do you need money, Adam?” I ask, point-blank.

“Why, you offering?” That’s just like him to deflect, to joke. “We’ll get through this,” he says. “It’ll be tight for a while. Might have to whittle down the number of breweries some more. Girls, it’s getting cold! Let’s wrap up the game!”

Macy howls in protest, as her older sister seems to be getting the better of her, and she doesn’t want to be on the losing end of the final score. She says, “Just a little longer,” which Adam probably already factored in. With these girls, everything is a negotiation, every command merely an opening bid.

And he changed the subject, I note.

He exhales a heavy sigh. “Amazing how life can turn,” he says. “One minute, you think you’ve got it all figured out, all planned and secure, and then . . .” He snaps his fingers. “And then everything you believed in, every assumption you had made—poof.”

“Yeah.”

“And we—we were just getting over Monica,” he says. “That year of torture when she left, when I tried to explain to the girls that Mommy left because of the drugs, not because of them, and then she OD’d, and any hope we had that she might come back . . .”

“I know.”

“And we’re finally crawling out from under that—y’know, two of the most brutal years of our lives—and COVID hits. My breweries tank, I have half of what I used to have and will probably lose more . . .”

I grab his arm. “They might hear you.”

He looks at the girls, who aren’t paying attention, scrambling for a loose basketball on the driveway court.

“Jesus, I’m sorry.” He chuckles. “I promise, most of the time, I’m okay. Just sometimes, especially if I’ve had a couple of these,” he says, raising his glass of wine. “Sometimes it all comes tidal-waving back.”

“You have every right to all of those feelings. You’ll be okay.”

He smiles at me. “Look forward, right?”

Exactly. Just like Monica used to say. Look forward, not back.

Well, maybe you can look back a little.