“An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent,” Janet finished the quote.

Great. His entire personality could be summed up by Dr. Seuss.

“So you think this is just the middle-aged crazies?” Janet sounded relieved. “Well, he won’t be the first guy to get the urge to dip his wick into a much younger woman when the clock starts tolling fifty.”

His hand tightened around the banister until his knuckles showed white and his arm shook. To hear all his pain, all his teeth-gritting self-control, all his astonished joy dismissed as a midlife crisis was almost more than he could bear right now. He knew his sister and his mother loved him, but they didn’t know him. Nobody knew him.

Except Clare. Who was lost to him now.

He let his next step come down loudly, then thudded the rest of the way down the stairs. His mom’s tiny living room opened directly onto an even tinier dining room, where the two women were sitting, folding single printed sheets of paper into thirds.

Margy Van Alstyne looked up at him with the face of a worried chipmunk, well-padded cheeks between frown lines above and a little wedge of a chin below. That, combined with her short, beer-keg body, gave her a misleadingly harmless appearance. “Hey, sweetie. We were just talking about you. Did you have a good nap?”

He cleared his throat. He could at least try to sound normal, even if he couldn’t feel that way. “Yeah, I was out like a light. What’s this you two are working on?” He picked up one of the pamphlets. “An antiwar rally? Aw, Mom, not again.” One of his mother’s proudest possessions was a photo from a 1970 Time magazine showing her in a screaming match with the then-governor of New York at a peace demonstration.

“Just because the corporate war machine doesn’t have you in its clutches this time doesn’t mean I’m not going to shout out against this blood-for-oil idiocy.”