9:31 P.M.

“THE FIRST SIX MONTHS ARE THE hardest,” Conrad says. “I remember when we took my daughter home, my wife would barely let me touch her. All she did was cry.” He motions to the waiter for more wine. His cheeks are rosy, and he puts a hand to his chest when he laughs.

“A whirlwind,” Audrey adds. “Feedings and sleepless nights.” She looks sympathetically at Jessica, who nods.

“I’m out of that part, mostly.” She hasn’t quite recovered from her previous embarrassment, I can tell. Jessica retreats fairly easily, but she doesn’t stay down long. I know she’ll be back and engaged soon enough.

“How old is the baby?” Audrey asks.

“Seven months,” Jessica says. “Although he looks like he’s two years old.” She looks at me to corroborate.

“It’s true,” I say. “He’s big! And both his parents are so tiny.”

Jessica laughs. “I don’t know where he came from. Sometimes I tell my husband I had an affair with a linebacker.”

When Jessica first started using the term my husband, I thought it was so crazy. We were just twenty-five, we were babies. The biggest thing I did was purchase a new Brita filter.

“But Conrad’s right,” Jessica says quietly. “I barely know where I am right now.”

“We were happy,” Robert says, steering us back. “You were the most beautiful baby either one of us had ever seen. Your mother used to say you looked like a little doll.”

“She still calls me that,” I say. Baby doll. I always figured it was just a term of endearment.

“Cabbage Patch Kid,” Jessica says. “I can see it.”

“Freckle face.” From Tobias.

“You used to like them,” I say. I’m being candid.

He raises his eyebrows at me. “Did I say freckles are a bad thing?”

Are we flirting? How is it always so easy to get back here?

Habits make of tomorrow, yesterday.

“You were beautiful,” Robert says. He clears his throat. Takes a big gulp of water. “I was working. I made enough so that your mother didn’t go back after her maternity leave. Things were difficult, but still okay.”

Conrad adjusts his notebook in his pocket. Audrey keeps looking at Robert encouragingly. I can tell it’s taking effort for him to continue.

“What happened was we got pregnant with another baby.”

The table falls silent. Only Audrey says, “Oh dear.”

“Mom never said that,” I say, as if trying to prove him wrong. Another baby?

“She was excited, naturally. She was already three months when we found out. We weren’t trying. You were three years old and a handful.”

I’m looking at Robert, who appears older all of a sudden. Like he’s not the age he was when he died, but the age he would have been had he lived.

“There was no heartbeat at the five-month checkup. It was a girl.” The staccato sentences come one after the other. They seem to hit me straight in the chest like skipping stones. Not for what they lost, so long ago. But for the history I’ve been missing. The key passage torn out of the book.

“So you started drinking to numb the pain?” I ask. Because regardless, we still ended up here. That hasn’t changed.

“We had all the usual issues a couple does when they go through something like this. I was already sick; I mentioned that. It’s a lifelong disease. The circumstances just heightened it.”

“That’s understandable,” Audrey says. I feel Jessica glare at her next to me, and I feel a rush of affection for my best friend.

“The thing that I regret is that I didn’t realize what I did have. I lost sight of you. I was so busy mourning one thing, I forgot about the other.”

I look down at my plate. My risotto appears cold and plastic, like the for-show plates that sit outside Italian restaurants in Little Italy. It makes my stomach turn just looking at it.

I feel a hand on my shoulder. I know it’s Tobias’s. I wonder if that ever fades. The feeling of his touch, like this. As if my skin is some kind of memory foam.

“She asked me to leave, but I would have gone anyway,” Robert says. “After another year, she could barely stand to be in the same room as me. And I had turned into a monster.”

“But you got help. After you’d already left us.”

Robert closes and opens his eyes. “Shortly after, yes. I rented a small room at a motel. The woman who ran the front desk took a liking to me, bless her. She found me in the closet, high off heroin, three days after I checked in. By some miracle she got me into a clinic. I barely remember that time.”

My sinuses start throbbing. I can feel them behind my eyes like hot pokers. This happens sometimes. I get brutal, debilitating headaches. When I was in college I would have to lie in a dark room for days, sometimes, with a cold compress on my face. They’re better now, manageable, but there is never any telling when one might completely knock me off my feet. I pray it’s not now.

“Headache?” Tobias says next to me. His tone has dropped, the decibel he used to use in the mornings when he’d bring me coffee or want sex. Sweet, languid. Like we had all the time in the world.

I press a thumb to my eyebrow and exhale the pressure. “I need some air,” I say. If I have any hope of this not spiraling, I need to move.

I push back my chair and stand up. Conrad stands up, too. “I’ll accompany you,” he says. “Let’s go outside.”

I want to be alone, but I’m not sure that’s an option, and anyway the way he says it, fatherly, authoritative, like a professor, which he is, makes me nod in agreement. I grab my bag to take with me.

“Are you sure you can…” Robert looks concerned. He knows we’re not finished yet.

“Jessica went to the bathroom,” Conrad says. “We’re fine.” And that’s that.

Conrad holds open the door for me, and we step outside. The air is cold, and I wish I had brought out my coat. It hasn’t snowed yet, but I get the sense it might. Not tonight, but soon. Holiday decorations are up. The city is in the jovial, neighborly phase it enters every year from Thanksgiving through New Year’s. It can be the loneliest season, December in New York.

I pull my scarf around me. I stick my fingers in my bag and root around for the pack. I offer Conrad one. I didn’t start smoking alone until Tobias left, and then I never stopped.

“What the hell,” he says. “This can’t possibly count.”

We inhale and exhale together. Smoke fills the air around us.

“How are you doing?” Conrad asks.

His arms are crossed and he’s looking at me with his head tilted. His lips shift side to side subtly and I have a wave of nostalgia for his class—the mentor I found nearly ten years ago.

“You know it was originally Plato,” I tell him.

He raises his eyebrows at me like go on.

“On the list,” I say, inhaling.

He nods, recognition dawning. “I would have liked to see that.”

“Me too,” I say. I laugh, and the smoke exits my lungs in a hurry.

“Why did you swap him out?” he asks.

“After class was over,” I say, “I always felt like you had more to teach me.” I want to add something more. Something about how he was a grown man who was there for me, and I’d never had that before, not really. Something about missing him, but I don’t want it to come out wrong.

“So how are you doing?” he asks me after a moment. “I’m going to keep asking.”

“Not so great,” I say. I move my thumb back and forth from my temple to the top of my nose. I take another drag. Hold it. “I have a headache,” I say through my exhale.

“Indeed.”

“I get them sometimes,” I say.

“I remember a particular midterm where you had taken to your sickbed for this very condition.”

“Out of hundreds of students, you remember that?”

“I do,” he says, chuckling.

“I was lying,” I say. “I was so behind in your class. I missed half the lectures.”

Conrad laughs. “Then what, might I ask, am I doing here?”

The smoke dances in the night air. “It wasn’t about your class,” I say. “I loved you.”

I look over at him. He nods. He knows this. Conrad seems, all at once, to know everything. What has happened, how all this will end. So I ask him.

“What is going to happen in there?”

He taps some ash down. I watch it fall. “I think you will remember some things.”

“Like that I love my father?”

“Maybe.” He inhales. “It might help.”

“It might hurt,” I say. “He is, after all, dead.”

Conrad laughs. It’s another hearty belly laugh. “And?”

I look inside. Jessica is leaning over the table, showing her wedding ring to Audrey. Robert is saying something to Tobias.

“And.”

If our relationship could be described in one word, it would be that. Never final. Never just this. Always and what if? And next. And after. There was always a sequel.

“I don’t know,” I continue.

“Now, that’s not true.”

Tobias leans over Robert. He pulls something out of his pocket. A watch. I take a step closer to the glass. Robert holds it in his hand. It’s a gold pocket watch. I gave it to Tobias for his twenty-ninth birthday. It was my father’s. It was the one thing I had of his, that he’d worn, and I gave it to Tobias. It was half compass, half watch. I remember saying to him: So we can always find our way back.

He brought it here tonight.

“We’re not finished,” I say.

Conrad takes another inhale and then snuffs his cigarette out on the pavement. He holds open the door. It’s only nine-thirty. We have food still on the table. But that’s not what I mean.

We’re not finished. We’re here to find our way back.