Chapter 1

The dream came three nights before the phone call.

Joshua Lowenstein was not a man who remembered his dreams. He slept the way he did most things — hard, efficiently, without much poetry. But this one he remembered. This one clung to him through the alarm and the shower and two cups of black coffee, trailing him into the gray Brooklyn morning like something alive.

Zack was standing in a room Joshua didn’t recognize. Not their parents’ apartment on Crown Heights, not the little synagogue Zack had adopted as his second home after he went full Hasidic at nineteen. Just a room, white and still, with light coming from somewhere Joshua couldn’t find. Zack was wearing his black coat and his wide-brimmed hat, his beard fuller than Joshua remembered from the last time they’d had lunch together. He looked calm. He looked the way he always looked — settled inside himself in a way Joshua had never quite managed.

“Remember who you are,” Zack said. “Don’t disappoint me.”

That was all. Joshua woke at 3 in the morning with those words sitting on his chest, stared at the ceiling of his Park Slope apartment for twenty minutes, and then went back to sleep. He told himself it meant nothing. He and Zack had always been close despite everything that separated them — age, temperament, the six years and the vast theological distance between Josh’s Friday nights at a bar and Zack’s Shabbat table. He probably just missed his brother.

He forgot about the dream by noon.

He was at his desk at the architecture firm Thursday morning, coffee going cold beside his keyboard, when his mother called. He knew from the first sound she made before any words came — a sound that wasn’t quite a word, high and broken — that something had already ended.

The car ran a red light on Eastern Parkway at 7 in the morning. The other driver walked away. Zachariah Lowenstein, twenty-two years old, married four months, was pronounced dead at Kings County Hospital at 7:48 AM. He never regained consciousness.

Joshua drove to his parents’ apartment in a cab because he did not trust himself behind a wheel. His mother was on the couch with her sister when he arrived, rocking slightly, her face doing something he had never seen it do. His father sat in the chair by the window with his hands on his knees, not moving. Abraham Lowenstein was a man who had always known what to do. He did not know what to do now.

Joshua sat with them for four hours. He made phone calls. He made tea that no one drank. He did not cry until he was alone in the bathroom with the water running, and even then he kept it quiet.

Katie arrived at six that evening, because Katie was the kind of woman who showed up. She came with food from the deli two blocks over and she hugged his mother and shook his father’s hand and sat beside Joshua on the couch and held his hand, and he was grateful for all of it. She was good at this. Katie Gifford was good at most things she decided to be good at.

They had been together two years. She was twenty-six, blonde, relentlessly competent, successful enough in her interior design business that she no longer had to take clients she didn’t like. For the past year she had been angling, patiently and then less patiently, toward a conversation about their future. Joshua had been angling away from it without being able to explain why, even to himself. He loved her. He was mostly sure he loved her.