Her head was down, her coppery hair obscuring most of her face. The corner on which they stood was just east of Battery Park City, where she lived. As far as Mandy was concerned, though, it might as well have been miles away.Looking around him, Eric was struck by a sense of having narrowly averted a possible disaster. The street was pretty much deserted this far west. If Mandy had gone home alone, anything could have happened.…A buried memory flickered through his consciousness, disjointed images of nights like this—stumbling from pillar to lamppost, negotiating each curb as if it were a precipice, fighting to maintain his balance on pavement that rocked like a suspension bridge. How he’d managed each time to get where he was headed, to survive, had to be some kind of miracle in itself.His AA sponsor had put it best. Carl Jagger, a burly black trucker from Tennessee—with whom Eric had had only one thing in common, but whom he’d grown to love like an uncle—had listened intently as Eric haltingly told his tale about the car wreck that had taken his co-anchor Ginny’s life, but which had spared his own.
