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neighbor and you saw him coming back from the market every day with onions and carrots sticking out of his grocery bag.”
    “Much too mundane for the connection we have.” Isabelle is teasing, but not completely, and Deepti watches her banter with Jilly without saying anything.
    “Okay, maybe he was your teacher in a past life and that relationship shadows this one. That’s what you feel.”
    Isabelle shakes her head.
    “What do you lose by believing that?” Here is Jilly beginning to push her point of view again for the sake of winning the debate. This Jilly, Isabelle recognizes.

    “It’s comforting,” Isabelle says finally, because she doesn’t want to argue with Jilly or because she’d like to believe it, or both. She doesn’t know.
    —
    MUCH LATER ON, WHEN THE HOUSE is that stark quiet of 3 a.m. and the three women are sleeping, Nate gets up from his laptop and slips into bed beside Isabelle. He gathers her warm body into his arms and she stirs, hardly awake, and then settles back into sleep.
    “I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” he says very softly into her ear.
    “Mmmmm.” She has no idea what he’s talking about, but she wants nothing more than sleep.
    “That whole business about Jablonski and you—it’s a setup for disappointment, and I’m trying to prepare you.”
    He’s apologizing, Isabelle understands immediately. This is his way of doing it, obliquely, never head-on, but still…
    “Okay,” she says, and burrows deeper into his arms. That’s why she’s with him, she tells herself, because he cares about what happens to her. All the rest doesn’t matter.

CHAPTER THREE
    D aniel gets up early on Tuesday morning and rereads Isabelle’s pages from the week before. They never got around to discussing them because Isabelle, emboldened by their discussion of writing and freedom, asked Daniel about his first two novels. How he came to write them. And how much he took from his personal life, since the first one was about a man coming to terms with his difficult father’s death and the second about a divorce.
    “Everything,” Daniel told her. “I stripped my life bare.”
    “Without regard to the people you might hurt?”
    “My father was dead and my ex-wife thought I had been overly kind to her in the book. Not in real life, I might add.”
    “Don’t you have a responsibility, though, to the people who care about you?”
    “Don’t you have a responsibility to the work you are doing?”
    “Which is?”
    “To tell the truth, as you see it.”
    “Despite—?”
    He cut her off. “Despite.”
    Today he has to talk to her about the pages that complete Chapter One. What he realizes as he rereads them in the tiny back sunroom that he’s turned into his home office is that she has to get out of her own way. When she does, her writing is interesting; when she doesn’t, he feels like tossing the pages in the trash bin.
    —

    STEFAN, QUIET THIS MORNING, walks his father to campus. Daniel is grateful for the lack of strained conversation. The silence allows him to focus on his rising tide of panic, the tingling he feels along both arms, his ragged breathing, the sweat accumulating under his arms and across his palms, the certainty that he’s building up to a heart attack, the terror that he’s going to pass out here, on campus, in full view. Breathe in, he tells himself with one step, breathe out with the next.
    “It’s a waste of time, you know,” Stefan says finally as they’re passing in front of the science building, Dunham Hall, and Daniel looks at his son, really for the first time this morning. That’s the thing about a panic disorder: it tends to fill up a person’s consciousness. Now he sees that Stefan is dressed in a button-down shirt and jeans without holes in them, a miracle in and of itself. He must have yet another job interview.
    “You go in with that attitude, you’re guaranteeing it’s a waste of time.”
    “You’re telling me it’s mind over