“Yeah, you are. But I’d prefer if it wasn’t like soon. Otherwise, what’s it all been for?”

“What’s all what been for?”

“I mean, you know, Wyatt saving us. Jim getting his life together to raise us.”

She pushed her cup around on the table. “Sometimes I think it wasn’t for anything. It was just stuff that happened. And now we’re all here and so what? Jim’s probably going to die pretty soon. Wyatt’s going out of business. Everything’s a dead end.”

Mickey put his own cup down. “Craig was that important to you? He’s gone and now you’ve got nothing to live for?”

She shook her head. “It’s not just him being gone. It doesn’t even seem like it’s so much him personally anymore. It’s more the idea that I lived with this, this illusion, for all that time, thinking I was going somewhere, that he and I were going somewhere, and that all of it mattered.” She leaned in across from him. “I mean, Mick, it all made sense. It hung together. I’m talking about the world.”

“And now it doesn’t?”

“I can’t seem to find where my real life connects back in to it.”

“You think you’re going to find it sitting up in the tower?”

“I don’t know where I’m going to find it.”

“So you’ve given up looking? That’s kind of what it seems like from here.”

“Well, that’s not it.”

“No?”

Anger flashed in her eyes. “No!” Then, in a softer tone, “I am really trying not to lose it altogether here, Mickey. I don’t think you can really understand what it’s like when the rug’s pulled out from under you like it was from me.”

“Yeah,” Mickey said. “I can. It got pulled out from both of us another time. And that was a lot worse than you losing your boyfriend. I remember it pretty well.”

“What’s your point?”

“My point is you’re too young to give up. There’s people out here in the real world who care about you-me, for instance, and Jim, and even Wyatt-and maybe you owe it to all of us to try to care a little back in return.”