Andy disassembled his weapon with lighting speed. He packed it away in the black backpack made specifically for a weapon of this sort. He bolted to the roof access door as fast as his little, chubby legs would carry him. He made his way through the condo/office building stairwell without being noticed just as he had done on his way up. Andy was good at his job. And for a nine-month-old baby, he was really good at it.

And there’s the biggest difference between us, Michelle. There’s the difference that should have kept us from maybe ever even becoming friends to begin with. Hope doesn’t mean anything. Hope is what people have or do when they can’t have or do anything else. Hope is inaction. It’s sitting back and just waiting for what you want to come. It’s hoping for everything to work out. It’s what we have when we feel we have nothing else. I don’t ever want to hope. I want to have. I want to try. And I’m okay if I fail. Hope won’t get anyone a goddamn thing. It never has, and it never will.”

A year had passed since Chuck died. I had quit Tigris and put my dusty PhD to good use as an adjunct professor at Nevada State University where I taught uninterested twenty-somethings the finer points of Beowulf and the Epic of Gilgamesh. The schedule allowed me to work on my novel, and the pay was enough that any freelancing I did was out of choice, rather than need. My nights were void of death-metal concerts, replaced by bath time with my boys.

We spend our lives surrounding ourselves with the right people and the right job and right amount of shit to call our own. Life is a puzzle. We gather the pieces and put each one in place, and when we can finally make out the picture, we’re complete. But then a piece is taken away or lost. People die. Friends become strangers, lovers lie. At best, we can still make out the picture, but it’s clear something is missing. And those pieces can never be replaced.

Mark decided to move to New York, which meant Lou was down his best friend in Chicago and had to find his own apartment. Mark came with him on the final walk-through. It was a two-bedroom just a few blocks away from where they had been living. Lou liked the neighborhood, and the rent was right where he needed it to be. It wasn’t the flashiest apartment—the walls bulged out in certain spots, the kitchen floor sloped ever so slightly, the rooms were small, and although Michelle would have thought it was a total shithole, it was just what Lou needed.

It wasn’t that Lou was hung up on Michelle, it was that the past three years of his life had been so focused around her. She was central to everything, and it was all he had to talk about. Talking about anything before The Age of Michelle seemed entirely out of context. That’s the hardest part about breakups: finding a new definition of yourself. Since the breakup, Lou had continued sinking in a sea of whiskey and cigarette smoke while searching for that new definition among the fragments of the past three years. He didn’t talk about Michelle because he missed her; he talked about her because he didn’t know how not to.

Brother, do not blame yourself for Chuck’s death. He was on a course to destruction. If it hadn’t been your house, it would have been someone else’s or the highway or by a policeman’s bullet.

If anything, it’s my fault.

“When he was done, I stood up and said, ‘Hey! What the fuck are you doing?’ Then I punched him in the face. I almost knocked his ass out and right into the pool.”

“Hang on a minute. You said, ‘When he was done.’ Do you mean that you woke up and even after you saw Cal Keller was giving you a blowjob, you kept letting him? So, you actually finished.”

R.J. stopped pacing. “Well, yeah. I mean, I was drunk. I didn’t know what was going on at first. Not until I blew my wad.”

“Oh, my God, R.J. Okay, so then what happened?”

“I made him take me to the ATM and made him give me all of his money in his account or I’d beat him to death.”

“You mugged the guy after he sucked you off? And how much money did you get?”

Lou and Mark shuffled their way around a line of people, and Lou pulled open the door. A large bouncer pushed it shut in their faces.

“Line forms out there,” the bouncer said.

They turned and looked. “There’s a line? For what?” Mark asked.

“To get in,” the bouncer said.

Mark looked through the window next to the door. “But there’s plenty of space in there. There are even empty seats at the bar. What gives?”

“Line forms back there,” the bouncer said again with even more authority.

Lou picked Michelle up from work on his way back into the city. It was Friday and they were going to try a few a of the neighborhood bars. When they arrived at the condo, they headed straight to the bedroom to change out of their work clothes. Lou could have worn hole-filled sweatpants to the shop; no one would have cared—it’s not like he met with clients on a regular basis. Most days he was the only one in the office with a handful of union workers out in the shop doing whatever union workers get paid to do when not on a job site. But wearing a nice pair of slacks and a tie made him feel a little more professional. His mother taught him long ago that what a person wears directly affects one’s attitude. It helped motivate him to look for other jobs if he was wearing a tie. It also made him feel like less of a degenerate drunk when he would have two scotches for lunch.