He’d always been able to drop into the world he was reading about so easily, but this had become a futile exercise over the past couple of weeks. He could only remember being this preoccupied once before in his life, and at the end of the day, that had turned out okay. Was it even remotely possible that he was going to be able to say the same about this at some point in the future? And if so, why couldn’t he feel even a hint of that optimism in his heart? The clock on the family room wall read a couple of minutes after nine. Polly and he had bought that clock in a craft store in upstate Connecticut while she was pregnant with Becky. She’d scoffed at his wanting to buy something so rustic when all of their furnishings were so refined, but she didn’t protest his decision, and when he put it up in the family room she admitted that the clock had a certain “off-kilter charm.” They hadn’t discussed his taking the clock with him to his new apartment, but he assumed that if he left it behind, it wouldn’t stay on the wall for more than an hour after he was gone.
