I needed another few years of sleep. I needed to watch Mark Stevens and Lucille Ball in The Dark Corner again. I needed to see anything before 1967 with Joan Crawford in it.

Knock.

“Lewis, open the door.”

It was Ann Horowitz, my therapist. I had stumbled onto her a few years ago while serving papers. She had been called to testify about a patient who had tried, with less than half a heart, to kill himself. For some reason, Ann had thought me an interesting case and had taken me on for ten dollars a session. Ann and her husband had officially retired to Sarasota from New York a decade earlier, but at the age of eighty, Ann, a small, solid, always neatly dressed woman, was full of energy, curiosity, a love of history and an unending enthusiasm. She was my opposite. We were made for each other. She had a small office off Main Street across from Sarasota Bay.

Ann had gotten me to admit that I didn’t want to give up my depression, that giving up my depression meant giving up my grief, my grief over Catherine. I guarded my grief. I had paid a high price for it. I wasn’t ready to give it up, but I was willing to address it. Ann had gotten me to finally speak Catherine’s name, to admit to small links to people in the present, links I resented but couldn’t deny. I didn’t want to invest in someone else who might be taken from me by age or accident or intent.

“Lewis,” Ann said outside the door. “I’ve got coffee, biscotti, an open day till a late lunch with my visiting but not welcome cousin Rachel.”

I didn’t answer.

“I read your note,” she said. “No does not always mean no. And sometimes, but not often, when you put that plastic key in the ignition, the car actually starts. Somewhere we are tickled with the fancy that the car might start this time.”

Not me, I thought. Putting the key in the ignition meant you thought there existed a glimmer of hope. Putting the key in the trash basket meant you weren’t going to be drawn into the game.