As the ball dropped in Times Square and 2007 arrived, I wrote in my notebook, “I keep thinking about all the lies.”

“You’re going to go back over everything that happened,” Graham had warned me. “All the things I said, all the things I did—and you’re going to doubt me.”

He was right. And it wasn’t because of the explosion, which wasn’t really his fault, or the fact that he was still smoking crack, which wasn’t really a surprise. It was because I called the therapist he had supposedly been seeing and found out she didn’t have a Scottish patient with a drug problem.

“I know you can’t talk about clients because of patient confidentiality,” I explained when I called her. “But if you’re not seeing a Scottish photographer who came to you because of a drug problem, you could tell me that, right?”

She paused before answering, pondering the ethical loophole I’d drawn.

“Because he’s been arrested,” I added, eliding my own dubious motive for calling. “I just bailed him out of jail. So if you do have a patient who fits that description he really needs help now.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s possible I had a consultation with someone like the person you’re describing, but I probably would’ve referred him to another therapist. Addiction isn’t really my specialty.”

That revelation blew me apart. All summer and fall, Graham had talked about how much “Debi” was helping him—negative behaviors he was addressing, questions she had asked, how she’d “laid on a plate” the root causes of many of his problems. One night in November, he walked off in the middle of a fight, telling me he really needed to talk to her.

“She said I should call if I was having an emotional reaction that was overwhelming,” Graham explained, leaving me standing outside a Chinese restaurant on St. Marks Place. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. I just want to find somewhere quiet so I can hear her.”

I had my doubts at the time—how many therapists interrupted their dinner to take a call from a distraught client? But I didn’t doubt Debi existed; I just didn’t believe he was going to call her. Tompkins Square Park was two blocks away.

That memory made me furious. I’d spent thousands of dollars on therapy, plumbed the dark corners of my own psyche, pored through all the journals I’d kept since third grade. Meanwhile, Graham was feeding me lines he’d probably read in a self-help book he picked up for a dollar at a stoop sale. Even worse: I believed he was seeing a therapist because his behavior did actually change.

But once my anger faded—and with Graham it usually burned out quickly, like crumpled paper—I thought about how desperate and alone he must’ve been feeling to conjure up a shrink who gave him advice. And if he knew he needed help (it turned out he did have one appointment), why didn’t he try harder to find someone?

Maybe if he had called another therapist, if he hadn’t been so stubborn, if he’d had insurance and counseling was covered, there wouldn’t have been a crack pipe in the house when the windows blew out. And we might’ve had a chance to get back together, but that possibility was gone now. When he got arrested, Graham crossed a line and I wasn’t going to follow him where he was headed.

I sent him an email just after the New Year, our non-anniversary weighing on my mind. I kept picturing him in his dark house with the windows boarded up, the cold wind sneaking in, the ghost of my surprise visit a year earlier slithering around the couch, the bed, the stairs, and the floor. I wondered if he’d swept up the tiny white pellets that looked like snow.

“I really think it would help you a lot to find someone to talk to—a real Debi,” I wrote. “I know you’re scared to do that, and worried that it won’t help. All I can say is that I was way more resistant than you were when we first started seeing David, and when I finally started being open with him, it changed my life.”

Graham wrote back: “i don’t know what happened to get me here. your right—i need to stop doing things myself. i’m scared to go to someone and fail.”

When I read that last sentence, I cried. It was one of those moments that made me think Graham was still reachable—that if someone could just get through to him, maybe he could be pulled back from the brink. But those tears were tainted with guilt and the bitter taste of failure: I already knew that that “someone” wasn’t going to be me. And by that point, so did he.

—

JUST AS GRAHAM was distancing himself—no more phone calls, only a few emails—my own life yanked my attention away. Over Christmas, my doctor had called to tell me the results of a biopsy I’d gotten before I left for Michigan: The spot on my forehead was skin cancer.

It wasn’t a devastating diagnosis, just a small basal cell carcinoma; my mom had already had the same surgery twice. But the black crisscrossed stitches left me looking like Frankenstein, and the Tylenol with codeine I was taking barely made a dent in the pain. I wasn’t supposed to drink, exercise, or do yoga—all of my avenues for escape—and I didn’t want to go out because of the scar on my face.

So I didn’t have much time to feel sorry for Graham; I was too busy feeling sorry for me.

During my days on the couch, I reread Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, which Graham had found in a giveaway box on his street. I’d read it first and hadn’t ever given it back, a deliberate omission in our post-breakup exchange of T-shirts, photos, and CDs.

“I keep thinking of the happiness book,” I wrote in my notebook that miserable January. “How we can’t predict what will make us happy because we can’t account for a future we can’t predict. I suppose at the end of 2005 I wouldn’t have glimpsed even a tiny bit of what happened last year.”

With my lucky number 7 tattooed on Graham’s arm and Gilbert’s advice buzzing in my ear, I tried to convince myself that 2007 might turn out to be better than I expected—and in many ways, it actually did. “Negative events do affect us, but they generally don’t affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to,” Gilbert wrote. I just had to get through a rough patch first.

Other than David, there wasn’t a consistent person I turned to as my relationship with Graham went through another ending; I relied on different people for different reasons at different times. Friends tried to be supportive, but I felt like I was living the parable of the blind men holding different parts of an elephant, each person’s perspective influenced by whether they were touching the trunk, tusk, or tail. I think we all tend to view addiction through the lens of our own experience with this affliction. In some sense, we’re all a bit blind.

Still, I was surprised by how judgmental some people were about Graham. Sure, he made bad choices and had to deal with the consequences, but wasn’t it a bit hypocritical not to look in the mirror and acknowledge one’s own struggle with vice? Listening to drinkers who doled out advice well into their third cocktail, smokers who bristled at any comparison between drugs and nicotine, pill poppers who relied on a doctor friend’s prescription pad, and drunk drivers who didn’t consider their own behavior criminal, I was struck by the empathy gap.

Graham was right about one thing: In the cultural perception of addiction, heroin addicts were definitely at the bottom of the barrel. And he sank even lower after he was arrested and went to jail.

But for every harsh judgment someone let slip, another friend propped me up with sensitive, caring advice. Ethan always seemed to have my best interest at heart—even if it stung when he finally said, “I’d cut bait.” Although, years later he’d tell me that his views on addiction had gotten more “nuanced” after his own relapse, which made me wonder if his opinion about Graham’s situation had also changed.

The best advice I got came from a colleague I didn’t know very well—or at least, not well enough to know that she once had a boyfriend who had a drug problem. When she told me about her ex, I instantly recognized the relationship she described, the intensity of his affection eventually trumped by the upheaval of his constant drama.

The way she put it seemed so simple: “I realized I had to choose his life or mine.”

I understood that decision—it was exactly how I felt after I bailed Graham out of Rikers. But there was one question that still troubled me, more as a moral dilemma most of us don’t want to face: What happens to these addicts after the sober, sane people in their lives leave them?

We all know the answer: Many of them don’t get better. We lock them up, or they overdose and die.

—

ON FEBRUARY 13, a year after Graham and I were strolling on the beach in Hawaii, I sent him a message saying I’d see him at his hearing the next day.

He wrote back: “Your better off not coming tomorrow ’coz my lawyer said it’s just getting postponed again probably. last time i was there all of 6 mins. i’d rather see you under better circumstances - especially seeing as we don’t see each other anymore and haven’t even spoke in ages - you understand?”

I reminded him that it was actually my responsibility to make sure he showed up for these hearings, since I was the one who had paid his bail. The receipt I’d signed at Rikers made that quite clear: “I undertake that the defendant will appear in this action whenever required and will at all times render himself/herself amenable to the orders and processes of the court.” It also warned: “The bail will be forfeited if the defendant does not comply.”

Even though it wasn’t my money at stake—Graham had already paid me back—I wanted to follow through on that commitment. More importantly, I felt a responsibility for him beyond the love some people feel for an ex. I was the last functioning adult Graham had been close to when he got arrested; there was no one else who could make sure he didn’t go completely off the rails. Graham was already teetering on the edge.

After the explosion, a local paper had described him as a “suspected drug dealer” living in an “alleged crackhouse” in brownstone Brooklyn—based on speculation and anonymous leaks by the police. I knew Graham was devastated by that article, so I went to his hearing partly to let him know I didn’t believe it. But if there was any evidence to back up either of those claims, I certainly wanted to hear it.

He was supposed to be at the courthouse by 9:30 A.M., shuffling through security with the mass of people filing through the metal detectors—mostly African American and Hispanic men. But Graham wasn’t there when I got to the courtroom upstairs, and he didn’t pick up when I called him. I debated walking over to his house, which was only six blocks away.

I knew Graham had hired a lawyer, so I tried to guess who that might be among the attorneys sitting on the front bench—the only suits in a crowd of winter coats, heavy work boots, and jeans. “Take your hat off in the back!” one of the uniformed court officers yelled. “Sir! No talking in the courtroom!” (Also not allowed: sagging pants, tank tops, or do-rags.)

After 10 A.M., probably the fifteenth time I turned to look as the door opened, Graham finally walked in, wearing a down jacket and pants I’d never seen. The new clothes were jarring, marking the three months since our paths had crossed: long enough that his wardrobe—and the season—had changed.

“I told you not to come,” he said, sliding into the aisle seat on the bench beside me.

“And I told you I was going to come anyway,” I whispered, hoping Graham would mimic my lowered voice.

“Where’s my lawyer?” he asked, still at full volume.

“Quiet down!” the court officer shouted.

Graham looked around. “He isn’t here. I’m gonna go call him.” Grabbing his messenger bag, he went out to the hall.

From that brief interaction, I couldn’t tell if Graham was using; even I was on edge with the court officer constantly shouting. That tension was magnified by seeing Graham for the first time in months. But I didn’t get a chance to talk to him—when he came back in, a tall man I assumed was his lawyer was by his side.

One of the benefits of being able to afford a private lawyer is that your case is usually called earlier in the session, so you don’t waste as much time waiting around. That was the main activity in the room full of what seemed like an excess of court personnel: everyone waiting for someone to find a piece of paper, or the right folder, or the answer to a question the judge had asked. It was nothing like the fast-paced courtroom dramas I’d seen on TV.

Once Graham’s case was called, he stood next to his lawyer with his hands clasped behind his back, facing the judge’s bench—IN GOD WE TRUST on the wall in front of him, flanked by two flags. It was all over in minutes, and I couldn’t hear most of what anyone said.

“The DA’s office hasn’t filed any evidence,” Graham’s lawyer explained, once the three of us reconvened in the hall. “They’ve got another month to do that—ninety days after the arraignment. If they don’t do anything by then, the case will get dismissed.”

“Does that mean they don’t have any evidence?” I asked.

“Hard to say,” he answered. “Sometimes these things take a while.”

I wanted something more: answers about the legality of the search, proof that the police had or hadn’t found drugs, some facts that would clarify what had actually happened. But the lawyer rushed off so I asked Graham if he wanted to go get a cup of coffee. I knew it was my only chance to pin him down.

He hesitated, probably weighing up whether I was going to grill him—or calculating how soon he was going to need a hit. The more time I spent with him, the more I was sure crack was still part of the equation he was trying to manage, and now maybe heroin again. I could finally see how exhausting that must be.

“I’m not going to yell at you,” I promised. “I came all the way down here to make sure you’re getting good legal advice, so at least you can talk to me for a few minutes.”

Graham looked at me like he doubted my motive, but I knew he couldn’t say no when I was standing right there in front of him. “Alright,” he said. “But I can’t stay too long. I’ve got a lot I need to do today.”

After we sat down at an old diner near the courthouse—a relic on a street sprouting expensive boutiques—I steered the conversation toward safer topics at first: how the window repair was going (the neighbors were complaining about his new “nonhistoric” windows), whether he’d finished his website redesign (almost done), how Liam was doing (fine, although Graham hadn’t seen him as much lately, with exams coming up). We both avoided the real reason Graham was seeing less of his son.

Graham asked me about the scar on my forehead, which had faded to a jagged red mark by then. “I’ve decided it makes me look like Harry Potter,” I said, showing off one of the benefits of nine months of therapy (optimism!). “My doctor said it’ll barely be noticeable once it heals.”

“I think you should find a new doctor,” Graham told me. “Why did he make such a long cut for something the size of a pencil eraser—was he charging by the inch?”

That was one of the things I missed about Graham: He wasn’t afraid to tell me things he thought I needed to hear. Uncharacteristically, I hadn’t really researched the doctor who did the surgery—a mistake I wouldn’t make when I needed it again.

The diner was starting to fill up with the lunchtime rush of office workers, and I could tell Graham was getting antsy to get on with his own pressing errand. But there was one more topic I wanted to bring up before he slipped away.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m not here to judge you or lecture you about drugs, but I’m worried that you might not be in a frame of mind to deal with this case. You don’t make the best decisions when you’re using, and I don’t want to see you end up in a situation that spins out of control.”

“You heard what my lawyer said,” Graham snapped. “The case is just gonna get dismissed.”

“If the DA doesn’t file any evidence. But you know how the legal system works: It’s not whether you’re guilty or innocent, it’s whether you have money for a really good lawyer.”

“I have a good lawyer. I’m paying him a fucking fortune to show up in court for ten minutes every six weeks.”

“I know. That’s why I want to make sure he’s doing his job, and I don’t know if he understands how this case could affect your immigration status. When I get home, I’m going to email you an article I read that said any conviction involving drugs could get you deported.”

“I’m a legal permanent resident. They’re not gonna kick me out of the country because of a misdemeanor.”

“Just promise me you’ll read it, and talk it over with your lawyer?”

“Alright, but I think you’re being a bit paranoid about this.”

That was the reaction I expected, but at least I’d delivered the message I thought Graham needed to hear. After he paid the bill, he walked me to the subway and gave me a hug before I descended underground—to the same platform where he kissed me the day he took my picture. Neither of us mentioned that it was Valentine’s Day.

“I’ll call you,” Graham said, which was what he always said whenever we parted. And I always believed him, like Charlie Brown running to kick the football Lucy always yanked away.

Later that afternoon, I sent him the article, highlighting this sentence: “A non-citizen who has entered the country legally but who has a conviction under ‘any law relating to a controlled substance’ is subject to deportation.”

In case he didn’t read the whole article, I explained, “Even seemingly minor charges that wouldn’t be a big deal for a U.S. citizen are treated very differently if you’re not a citizen, even if you have a green card—and most people don’t know that. This country isn’t particularly friendly toward immigrants these days.”

At that point, I didn’t think it was something Graham needed to be too concerned about, since it did seem like his case would get dismissed. I shared it more as a warning—another motivation for quitting. I’m not sure I would’ve admitted my own reason for worrying: that he might get sent far away from me. Seeing him had churned up emotions I hadn’t expected to feel, like a fever returning with a new round of chills.

“I’m glad I went today,” I wrote. “It was good to see you.”

“Likewise,” Graham answered. “Reminded me that i like you…………a lot!”

He didn’t acknowledge the article I’d sent, which I was pretty sure he didn’t bother to read.

The next day, Graham rode his bike uptown and left a bouquet of flowers outside my building, propped in a corner next to an envelope with my name. Inside was a card he’d made, using a photograph he’d taken of a door painted with a red heart. “Happy V Day on the 15th,” Graham wrote in the card. “A picture says a thousand words! And my lips are sealed right now.”

Over the next few days, I probably spent a thousand minutes trying to figure out what he meant. That he wasn’t telling me everything? That he couldn’t, because of his court case?

“Right now” suggested that at some point, he would.

—

THREE WEEKS AFTER Graham’s hearing, I met with a real estate agent to discuss listing my apartment.

By early April, it was officially for sale.

Within days after the first open house, we had a deal.

Even in the frenzy of New York’s heated-up real estate market, it was a fast pace for a transaction involving a mortgage—not to mention the approval of a co-op board. It was a record pace for a major decision for me.

I’d been thinking about selling my apartment on and off for years, as prices doubled, then tripled, and the residents in my building went from artists and writers—often, living alone—to married bankers and lawyers who needed two salaries just to make ends meet. Since my income wasn’t rising along with all of my bills, I finally decided it was time to cash in.

Having money may not have bought me happiness—as Daniel Gilbert warned it wouldn’t—but it certainly eliminated a lot of my stress.

My main source of anxiety was finding another place to live. Since I had to sign a lease before I got the check from my sale, I didn’t have many options; my income was too low to get approved for a rental involving a broker. So when a friend passed along a tip about a sublet in Brooklyn, I was intrigued: It had a roof deck, a fireplace, lots of light, and a washer and dryer (a rarity in New York City), but it was ten blocks from Graham’s house. I wanted to move to Brooklyn, but not necessarily so close to him that we’d bump into each other on the street.

By spring, we had settled into a new phase of our relationship: not trying to be friends, but not entirely cutting the cord. There’s no doubt Graham still had a mysterious pull over me, a mix of what-might-have-been regret and a lingering worry about his case. I saw my role as sort of a guardian angel—I even sent him a photo of another snow angel I made, with a caption to that effect. But most of our communications were digital: I’d email and ask how he was doing; he’d text me a photo once in a while. The only times we saw each other were at the courthouse in Brooklyn. I knew when Graham had a hearing because I’d signed up for email alerts from New York’s “WebCrims” database, which made it easy to track his case online.

I went to look at the sublet the same day as Graham’s fourth—but by no means final—hearing. The police had filed a ballistics report about the BB gun a couple of days before the deadline was up, which meant the case hadn’t gotten dismissed. But Graham’s lawyer said that there had been some “procedural errors”—by the police or the DA’s office, it wasn’t clear—so he was still optimistic about a dismissal. (In fact, the case would drag on for another year and a half.)

Since I wasn’t sure I could make it to the hearing, I didn’t tell Graham I might stop by. The courthouse wasn’t far from the sublet I looked at—and really liked—so I detoured there afterward, catching Graham just as he was hopping on his bike. He said nothing new had happened, just another adjournment. When I told him I was considering an apartment in the neighborhood, he didn’t seem to mind.

“It was nice to see you today—a surprise too,” he wrote me later. “Took me about half an hour to get rid of the lump in my throat after we parted! i won’t go on…..love g.”

A few days later, I sent him an email saying I’d signed the lease. He wrote back: “I can see your smile from here, which in turn has made me happy ’coz of your happiness. As i said if you need any help just ask - i’m right here.”

I’m not sure I would’ve described myself as happy, but I was definitely excited about moving on. For months David and I had been discussing my anxiety about change—where it came from, and what I could do to get “unstuck.” Selling my apartment was a big step out of that semiparalyzed state.

“It’s like you’re not safe enough in the world to let go of anything you have,” David once commented. It was a fair assessment of how I felt at that point, but it didn’t track with how I’d lived much of my life: leaving Michigan to go to Stanford, spending my junior year in Italy, moving to Argentina without speaking any Spanish. Up until my thirties, I took a lot of leaps off into the unknown.

By mid-2007, I think my insecurity was partly influenced by how much everything was changing, and how precarious everyone I knew was feeling, in their homes, their relationships, or their jobs. It was like we were all playing a game of musical chairs, scrambling to find a seat every time the music stopped—and within a few months, it would screech to a grinding halt. Selling my apartment gave me a financial cushion to ride out the recession, but it also left me feeling somewhat adrift.

Without the security of home ownership, a staff job, a spouse, or any kids, I was untethered from the things that usually anchor people down. On the one hand, that could be viewed as liberating: “If it’s any comfort,” one friend wrote me, “know that most women our age are at heart jealous of your freedom—or maybe that’s just me.”

Surrounded by moving boxes and trying to get an air conditioner, cable, and a phone line installed, I saw it from a different perspective: I wondered why I was doing this all alone.

—

FORTUNATELY, THE TRANSITION to Brooklyn was easier than I expected, and the nightmare of moving didn’t last as long as I’d feared (Daniel Gilbert was right!). But my new apartment was a lot smaller than the one I had sold, shrinking my home office, so I decided to join a workspace for writers—which had the added benefit of getting me out of the house. I made some new friends there, gossiping in the kitchen and playing on the softball team, and started swimming again, at the local YMCA.

I loved my new neighborhood. I finally felt like I lived somewhere I wanted to be. Every time I went away that summer, I was happy to come back home. I’d sit on the roof deck and watch the birds circling overhead, or water the flowers I’d planted—repotting the ones the squirrels dug up—and generally felt pretty good about my life.

As it turned out, I never ran into Graham. Not when I was buying paint at the hardware store, picking up groceries, or having dinner at one of the many new restaurants on Smith Street. We actually didn’t have any contact from May until August, after an email spat that started with Graham telling me to stay out of his business and ended with me firing back, “You don’t have to worry about me showing any interest in your life—time to let go.”

Even before that fight, our communications had been tapering off. After the first few hearings, I’d stopped going to court, because the proceedings felt like a charade. The judge would just adjourn the case and Graham was ROR’d—released on his own recognizance—even though it was obvious he didn’t recognize the trouble he was in. So when I got an alert later that summer saying Graham’s case was going to trial, I broke the silence, sending him an email asking what was going on.

“I’d rather you didn’t come to court,” Graham wrote back. “It’s not a place I feel comfy at the best of times never mind with you there—please.”

I understood why he didn’t want me to see him in that setting, branded as a criminal, still with no proof of his guilt. But I went anyway. When I’d asked David if he thought I should go, he told me I should act more on impulse—or just act, without deliberating so much. “Not having an experience is what’s dangerous for you,” he said, which was true. Sometimes seeing Graham kept me from dwelling on him, either idealizing how things were when we were together or worrying about how he was doing. It was a reality check I needed once in a while.

And despite his protests, Graham always appreciated my concern. He was like a teenager who slams his bedroom door but really does want someone to knock and ask what’s wrong. The difference was, Graham never had a problem talking. Sitting on a bench outside the courtroom, we filled each other in on our lives: Graham said he’d had a few jobs but no big commercial shoots, so he was constantly stressed about money; I told him about my apartment, articles I’d been working on, and a recent trip to the West Coast. It was always strange to see him and have these semi-normal conversations, then all these intense feelings would rise up and wash over me later, as if my emotions were set to a half-hour delay.

As it turned out, his case didn’t go to trial, but I was still glad I went—and so was he. His attorney seemed useless, which I told Graham before we parted, sending him an email later to drive home that point.

I really didn’t get the impression your lawyer is bringing his A game to your case. From what I’ve seen, he doesn’t seem to be all that aggressive about your defense. Shouldn’t he have noticed that the paperwork regarding the search warrant was missing? And would he have asked about that if I hadn’t asked him? I found it alarming that he didn’t seem all that prepared—or knowledgeable about the immigration issues involved.

You need an attorney who’s really going to go to bat for you, and who knows the implications if you get convicted or agree to some kind of plea. Setting aside all the emotional baggage we have together, I’m offering to help you because I don’t want to see you get sent back to jail or deported.

Graham wrote back: “Your right and I do want you to help. I’ll call you in a day or so.”

This time, I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t call.

Then out of the blue, Graham would text or email me—messages that made me feel like I was doing the right thing by keeping our line of communication open. They were also a sign that he was still capable of caring about me.

Just emailing to make sure your ok (I’m sure you are) and to let you know I am okay also. I was going to call you on one of those fine days last week to ask if you want to do something but got cold feet.

I actually was okay—writing about more interesting topics and traveling more for fun and for work. But Graham was clearly picking up speed in his tumble downhill. By the end of 2007, he’d been arrested a few more times for drug possession, and his financial situation was just as bleak.

In December, when he was trying to refinance his mortgage, he called me in a panic about the terms of the loan. He didn’t have enough cash to pay the closing costs, so I offered to lend him money to complete the deal. I asked him to drop off one of his vintage photographs as collateral, worth far more than the check I was giving him. Instead he brought a heavy portfolio with his whole collection—dozens of black-and-white prints by photographers like Bruce Davidson, Abelardo Morell, and Weegee—either overcompensating to prove I could trust him, or to make sure he didn’t sell them and blow the money on drugs.

I couldn’t be sure he really was refinancing, but I trusted him enough to take that risk. Graham had paid me back quickly when I bailed him out, and I really didn’t want to see him lose his house. Outside New York City, the real estate market was already tanking, and the economic downturn was clearly headed our way.

“Closed okay but it was very stressfull—my interest rate was 9.99%,” Graham wrote me. “I just had to go with it and hope that remortgaging in 3 months with my credit up and with stated income will bring it in at under 7%. Thanx for the money, it means a lot.”

He deposited what he owed me directly into my checking account, but he didn’t come by to pick up his photos. I was getting used to this cycle, so I tried to put Graham out of my mind—until Heath Ledger’s death a month later. He used to live down the street from Graham, but any news about an overdose was always disturbing for me. As the media churned through the usual angles—who knew, how could this have happened, why didn’t he ask anyone for help—I went to the courthouse one more time, hoping the headlines had also scared Graham.

In some sense, it was easier that he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was using—and using a lot, I guessed. But it was a shock when I saw him, literally wasting away. His clothes were filthy, his hands were shaking, and sweat was dripping down the side of his face.

Graham blew up when I said I was thinking of calling his parents.

“You’re not my girlfriend, you’re not my wife, it’s none of your fucking business!” he shouted.

“If you had a girlfriend or a wife, I wouldn’t be here,” I said—testy, but not raising my voice. “You obviously can’t handle this yourself.”

The truth is, if I’d had a boyfriend or a husband I probably wouldn’t have been there, either, but I hadn’t been in another relationship since Graham and I broke up. That’s not to say that I hadn’t met anyone I was interested in; I just couldn’t get past the crucial liftoff stage. David wanted to “problematize” my inability to find a new partner, but I’m not sure he fully appreciated what it was like for a single woman approaching forty, especially in New York City. I knew plenty of women who were frustrated by the pool of available men—who seemed to have their pick of eligible women.

When a friend offered to set me up on a blind date, she warned me that the guy had “recently been through a terrible breakup” and wasn’t at all what she thought of as my type. I politely passed on that opportunity, envisioning an awkward night trying not to look at my watch.

Someone I’d met at a party canceled three times before we finally went out for a drink, both of us realizing it hadn’t been worth all that effort. There just wasn’t any spark between us—and he was eight years younger than me.

And a guy who’d been emailing me several times a day and calling for hour-long talks told me he liked our “deep connection” but wasn’t interested in anything more: “i certainly have only wanted to have a friendship with you, and from my perspective i never did anything to suggest otherwise. yes, of course i called you a lot and we had long conversations and sent each other a lot of e-mails…did i cross some line in male/female relations? maybe so. but how can i know unless you let me know?”

Guilty as charged. I should’ve addressed our ambiguous status sooner, but in my defense, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get involved with him. I think we both used our friendship as a replacement for exes we weren’t totally over—although he did admit to a pattern of leaning on women he didn’t want to date: “this has happened with at least four female friends, so i’m certainly open to the possibility of my own implication.”

Eventually we settled into a less frenetic friendship, and he was actually a valuable confidant on the thorny topic of my ongoing involvement in Graham’s life. When he told me it seemed like I was still in love with Graham, I disputed that theory, insisting that loving someone and being in love weren’t the same. I knew some people saw that as a dubious distinction, but I didn’t. Graham as I knew him didn’t exist anymore. As addiction overtook him, like vines you stop cutting back or trying to control, it was getting harder and harder to remember who he used to be.

But I’d still catch glimpses of him every once in a while, which was what was so frustrating for me. Graham wasn’t completely dysfunctional, he wasn’t totally gone—there was a part of him that was still somewhere in there. That’s who I kept trying to reach, through the thorny vines that kept piercing me.

After Graham’s outburst in January, I sent him the names of a few drug treatment programs a friend recommended. He wrote back to thank me, then a couple of weeks later sent a message saying, “just to let you know i’m okay.” I didn’t answer, and I didn’t follow through on my threat to call his parents, which probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference. Even if I had known who else to call, or had tried to organize some kind of intervention, I’m not sure who would’ve shown up. By that point, Graham had succeeded at pushing everyone away—even me.

—

AS 2008 UNFOLDED, a sadness settled over me as I succumbed to the fear about the future gripping most of the world. When I confessed that anxiety in an email to my friend Alex, another writer I’d recently met, she weighed in with her usual Zen-like counsel.

“Among your greatest strengths, in my opinion, is your ability to sympathize and empathize with others,” she wrote. “My advice is to accept the sadness, but take your energy away from dwelling on it and put it to productive use instead.”

I tried. Mostly it was the shrinking media landscape that was precipitating a crisis of confidence. With fewer outlets to write for, it was getting tougher to get pitches accepted, and I started to wonder if I was going to have to abandon the freelance life. I bristled whenever anyone suggested I consider a career change, and spent a lot of my sessions with David discussing healthy ways to handle rejection.

By summer, I learned that my thyroid hormone levels had plummeted, which partly explained why my energy level and mood had also gone downhill. Once I was on medication, things perked up pretty quickly—just in time for my sister’s wedding in July. She got married at our parents’ house in Michigan, in a beautiful ceremony overlooking the lake. I was the maid of honor, and probably didn’t fulfill my duties with bridal-magazine enthusiasm, but it seemed like everyone had a good time.

In October my parents came to New York to celebrate my dad’s seventieth birthday. I took them out for dinner, splurging on reservations at the River Café in Brooklyn, one of those restaurants where the setting almost eclipses the meal. As we enjoyed our dinner on a floating barge with a view of Manhattan—“a truly special nite that I will never forget,” my dad emailed me later—a message I’d gotten from Graham that morning niggled at the back of my mind. He wanted to pick up his portfolio of photos and wondered when he could come by.

I hadn’t written him back, partly because my parents were in town, but I was also trying to put off whatever emotional disturbance I knew Graham would leave in his wake.

A week later, he wrote me again. Since David was drilling into me the downside of avoidance, I figured I should get it over with, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when Graham stumbled in. He looked worse than I’d ever seen him, and shared news that blew me apart.

“I’ve got a new girlfriend,” he announced, without any preamble—or awareness of my stunned response.

He sat down in my leather chair, scratching his head and rubbing his eyes, as if he was about to nod out. I numbly asked questions, trying to fill in the blanks.

“What’s her name?”

“Tracy.”

“How long have you been together?”

“A few months—she lives with me.”

“When did she move in?”

“Just after we met—she needed a place to stay.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s alright.”

“Just alright?”

“She’s got some problems. I’m trying to help her get clean.”

As each detail tumbled out, I felt another twist of the knife. It’s not that I hadn’t considered the possibility that Graham might meet someone else; I just thought it wouldn’t happen unless he got clean. And since he wasn’t exactly on a path to recovery, I wasn’t prepared for how much his moving on would hurt me.

It didn’t seem like much of a romance, but for me Graham’s indifference was almost worse. If he’d given up on love, he’d given up on turning his life around—especially now that he was involved with another addict. Graham was heading for an ending I couldn’t bear to see.

When I asked him about Liam, he couldn’t remember where his son was in college; he just squinted his eyes, shook his head, and blinked. Liam was the person Graham loved most in the world, so for a second I thought he looked as pained as I felt—but maybe that’s just what I needed to believe.

Seeing him in that state tore me apart, and that wound would take a long time to heal. But as it turned out, those photos weren’t the last link between us, and that encounter wasn’t as final as I thought it would be.