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farther, to take what was there to be taken.
    He paused, shaping his next thought while staring at the foam at the bottom of his glass. “What would you say if I told you I was thinking of moving to L.A. to start my career over?”
    â€œYou’ll never leave,” Joseph replied. “You’ve been living here too long to know what to do anywhere else.”
    â€œThat’s not what I wanted to hear,” William said, suppressing a whimper that would have summarized all of the panic he felt since he saw the dead scuba diver on the television set that morning.
    Joseph seemed to sense that panic anyway and stretched his arm out.
    â€œCome here,” he said softly.
    Two men hugging in an empty dive bar in the West Forties at 3:15 PM on a Tuesday afternoon was a strange sight even in a city of nine million. But they held on to each other briefly for dear life, like locked wrestlers taking a moment to catch their breaths, until the bartender carried over two cold beers and told them in a slow, incurious drawl that “this isn’t that kind of place.”

CHAPTER THREE
    ONE MORNING FIVE months earlier, Joseph walked into the kitchen, poured a glass of water from the tap, and found a rat sitting on top of the stove, licking burnt cheese off one of the metal rings. He dropped the glass of water in the sink and sprinted down the hallway to alert Del. “A rat. In the kitchen. On the stove.”
    Del pushed the blankets aside and stumbled to the kitchen before his arms succeeded in rescuing her from the infestation of the floor. She returned a minute later wiping her palms.
    â€œWhat happened?” he asked.
    â€œI caught it between two pans,” she said.
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd threw it out the window. It was so drugged up on poison it barely fought me.”
    Joseph had hugged her tightly. He later realized, with deep embarrassment, it had been the first time he had pledged his love to Del. Whether or not the rat had brought on the confession, he meant what he said. He felt safe with her. Joseph had always felt safest by himself, but Del possessed a toughness emphasized in her dark, narrowed eyes and black sweep of hair that concentrated rooms
to the rhythm she gave them. She didn’t nag him. She took simple compliments as if he were speaking in tongues, throwing them off with a wave of her hand, only for him to find her a few minutes later smiling with the eraser-wide gap between her front teeth fully exposed. He knew himself to be lucky every morning he woke up next to her, astonished that she agreed to be lying in bed with him day after day. He tried to learn a few words of Greek, but she said the nasal of his Ohio accent was like a blanket thrown on a fire.
    He had no intention of marrying her. In fact, his intention was to not get married. He simply liked that they were striving together, far more than two strangers operating on a survivalist’s arrangement of shared groceries and rent. When Del asked him to marry her a month ago, Joseph understood that it wasn’t just love that brought the question to her lips. He had witnessed Del in the midst of her darkest, most restless moods. She often sat on the sofa with her knees pressed against her chest, staring out of the window as the buildings across the street turned from blue to black. “Another day,” she’d whisper to herself. “There it goes.” He’d turn on music, pour her a drink to shake her from her thoughts, and only in the worst moments—usually two days into a work week—did she push him away and say angrily, “You can leave a job without walking out on the rest of your life. Why can’t I do that?”
    That was why he said yes to her that night a month ago. He didn’t need Del to confess her reasons, just as he hadn’t told her everything about himself. What Joseph wanted to say to William at the Hairy Bishop when his friend whined about his own wife walking