WHEN WADE DIDN’T PICK UP his phone, I drove by his apartment three times. I checked in to each of his favorite restaurants at least once. I even cruised the parking lot of the Coastal Club. No Wade.

I returned home to change my clothes. Just as I was taking off my federal-law-breaking Armani sport coat, I noticed most of MP’s wardrobe stacked and neatly folded along the edge of our bed. My girlfriend did this kind of thing all the time: some people get sober and become Oscar, and others become Felix. When I caught MP attacking the grout in our bathtub one afternoon with an electric toothbrush, I hired Yegua’s girlfriend to clean our house. Did I need to know that MP had a system for organizing in which brown sweaters were always closer to the top than navy sweaters? She was probably just reorganizing her closet.

The sight of my kitchen reminded me that I was extraordinarily hungry, and the clock on the microwave told me why: it was nearly seven o’clock, and I hadn’t eaten since … well, I just hadn’t eaten. Time flies when you’re obsessed with hydroponic pot farms and amateur pornography and why the fuck your dead friends are involved with either of these things. It was only when I opened a ginger ale that I noticed the juicer was gone. I could explain that, too: sometimes MP and her yoga friends had antioxidant parties.

I sat down in my Eames chair and watched the dusk settle into the canyons behind my house, and I had almost made myself forget about the neatly folded clothes when I heard a car cresting the driveway. I went outside to see MP in a Volvo station wagon with ALL PEOPLE YOGA painted on the side. It was the company car for the studio where MP worked. She switched it off and set the parking brake. She wasn’t crying, but she wasn’t not crying. I crouched beside her window and touched her shoulder. I didn’t have to ask whether she’d heard about last night and Colin Alvarez. I didn’t have to ask whether I had remembered to call her back.

“It might just be for a little while,” MP said.

“You didn’t want to take your own car?” I pointed at her VW Cabrio in the garage.

“That’s your car. I don’t want to think about that stuff.”

Refraining from begging her to stay felt like I was swallowing a tape measure. “What do you want to think about?”

“Whether I’m helping you by being your girlfriend. Actually, I want to pray about that.”

“Jesus, Mary Pat. How can you even ask that question?”

MP stared down into the steering wheel. “If you keep this up, you’re going to be back where you started eight years ago.”

“If it wasn’t for Terry, I wouldn’t be where I am right now.”

MP turned toward me; the compassion vanished from her face. She slammed her hand against the Volvo dashboard. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Randy! This isn’t about Terry—this is about you wanting to punish someone!”

My fist clenched, and I would have punched the side panel of the Volvo if I hadn’t seen the fear spark in MP’s eyes. My hand slowly returned to the window. Her mouth closed and softened before she spoke again.

“If my mother had left my father the first time he hit her,” MP said, “one way or another, he never would have hit her again. It’s as simple as that.”

“You think I could hit you?”

“You need to know that I won’t put up with this. In your bones, you need to know.”

Doing the kind of calculations that a drunk will sometimes do when he sees the writing on the wall, I figured the likelihood of getting through the next twenty-four hours without another assault. Not likely. Then I added up my love for Mary Pat Donnelly. It was significant, but balanced against the slim possibility that I could find out who or what had killed my sponsor, Terry Elias, it didn’t add up. I pinned an asterisk to both these estimates to represent the chance that I might also lose my bid for custody of my daughter. Still, God help me, I stood there.

MP looked at me, waiting for me to plead my case.

“Will you please tell me where you’re staying?” I said.