Chapter 1: Trying to Forget

The blinking cursor on Joe’s laptop screen had become a personal indictment.

Four hours.

He’d been staring at the same spreadsheet for four hours and the numbers might as well have been written in Sanskrit. His coffee had gone cold sometime around noon, he could tell because the ring of condensation on his desk had dried into a ghost of itself and the only thing keeping him tethered to consciousness was the low hum of the window AC unit fighting a losing battle against the rising June humidity pressing against his apartment windows.

Joe leaned back in his chair. The springs groaned.

He was five-foot-seven and a hundred and eighty pounds of distracted misery, and the chair, like everything else in his life right now, seemed to be losing patience with him.

His phone buzzed.

Jeff’s name lit up the screen, and Joe’s stomach did something complicated.

A twist.

A drop.

The kind of sensation that had become Pavlovian over these four and a half months.

Joe read the message three times.

Denise.

The name landed in his chest like a rock dropped into still water.

He could picture Jeff typing it, casual, oblivious.

Jeff was two-hundred-and-thirty pounds of loyal, uncomplicated friendship, a dad-bod wrapped in cargo shorts and a faded Yankees cap, happily married to Sarah for twenty-three years. The kind of guy who invited his buddy over for pulled pork and fireworks and had no reason to think that the invitation might send that buddy into a spiral.