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.