When I was not with him, I was thinking of him. On the surface, I could be conversing with my mother on the phone about which produce it was most important to purchase organic (blueberries: essential; bananas: not), or racing past the travertine-and-glass grid of the Grace Building in the sleet on my way to work, or eating a lunch of anesthetized midtown falafel with my fellow bright young coworkers, and I might pull all of this off convincingly, but really I was with Clive, imagining hypothetical interactions we might have that would lead to his confession. I imagined, for instance, that there might be a fire at the Little Sweet, and that after making our escape I would dash back into the building to rescue Vincia; afterward, as I breathed through an oxygen mask in the back of an ambulance, Clive would be so stricken by my self-sacrifice and my goodness, and by his own shame, that he would prostrate himself at my feet and tell me everything. Another scenario found us at the Heidelberg on the Upper East Side, washing down k?sesp?tzle and sauerbraten with steins of Dunkel. I would remark that the saying about the impossibility of stepping into the same river twice could be applied just as aptly to New York, a place as transient as it was eternal, the Germans of old Yorkville disappearing into the sediment and making way for new inlets and curvatures—Little Brazil, the Nepalese of Jackson Heights. This comment would strike Clive as so utterly insightful that he would decide that he had finally found a person worthy of being entrusted with his secret.

During this same interval, winter took firm hold of the city. It was the coldest winter anyone could remember, global warming be damned. Icebreakers turned the Hudson to shards. At crosswalks, pedestrians maneuvered around moats of frigid, gravy-colored slurry. The subway trains smelled of the particular sweat of overheated young financiers in puffer coats. That winter in New York was a period of collectively borne brutality, the sort during which it is possible for a passing glance between strangers on the sidewalk to contain an entire conversation about the awfulness of the season. Yet I had never felt more distant from my fellow urban denizens. As December wore on, I came to feel as if a pane of glass had slid between me and the rest of the world, a division so impregnable that when I collided with a man coming out of my office building one evening, I was so bewildered that I made my way to the subway at a near-gallop.

I SAID earlier that in general Clive did not speak about his life before New York and, in general, that was true. But there were a few exceptions to this rule, and I’d like to set those out here, because I can see now that they told me everything I needed to know, though I didn’t understand this then. There were small things, mentioned in passing: I learned that Clive had worn a pink and maroon school uniform. I learned that he was raised by his grandmother, though he did not say what had become of his mother and father. I learned that when Ghostbusters came to the island’s only movie hall, he snuck in at three forty-five every afternoon, just in time to watch the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man stomp through Columbus Circle (though he didn’t know it was Columbus Circle then—New York, he said, had seemed to him a blur of traffic, graffiti, and crazy characters, an impression that remained unchallenged until he touched down in the city himself over a decade later).

Clive shared these stories with me in his reserved way. He chose his words carefully, set each scene with a minimum of detail. Sometimes he would begin to tell me something, then shake his head and stop. “Never mind,” he’d say. “It’s boring.” I suspect he didn’t think I would understand, and maybe I wouldn’t have. Often, he paused for long stretches, during which I supposed he was reliving unspoken aspects of the stories privately, and I understood that these gaps were where it all resided, that my challenge was to parse these omissions, to decipher the negative spaces carved out by his stories.

One evening, after I told him a story about the late-night joyriding of my youth (a story lifted from the freeways of Southern California and transposed onto the streets of Starlight, Indiana, which were surrounded, in my telling, by endless fields of corn), Clive chewed his lip and said, “My mates and I used to take a boat out and party on beaches all around the island. Drink a bit, smoke a bit. I remember one night, we went to this cay called Faraway…” He paused. Smiled. “I used to know how to have a pretty good time.”

He uttered the name of that place as if it were nothing at all.

In one of Ian Mann’s novels, the private investigator explains to the parents of a victim that most murderers return to the scene of their crime, and this is how a surprising number are caught. They can’t help it, the investigator explains. The place tugs at them and they can’t resist. Was this what Clive was doing? Was saying the name of that place to me a way of returning to the scene? Did he reap some perverse pleasure from conjuring it indifferently, as if it were nothing more than the site of some fun party from his youth? For the first time in a long time, I felt afraid.

“That must have been super-fun,” I said, forcing a smile.

“Super-fun,” he repeated, laughing. “You’ve no idea.”

THE GALLEYS of The Girl from Pendeen arrived. On the cover, a woman in a flowing white dress strode barefoot along a cliffside path, her hair in a long, windswept braid down her back. It was my job to compile a list of twenty or so authors at least as well known as Astrid, track down their addresses, and mail them copies for endorsement. My boss had also acquired a debut novel—a thriller set on a commune in the New Mexico desert—which we had agreed a few months earlier I would edit. When the manuscript came in, just before the Christmas holiday, she called me into her office. The manuscript sat on her desk, a stack of paper six inches high. She drummed the stack with her fingertips. “I wanted to be sure you feel up to this?”

“Absolutely!” I said too loudly.

“It’s just—you’re behind on things, Emily. The backlog is piling up. You seem … Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s great! I’m super-sorry I’ve gotten behind, things have been a little crazy, but I promise I’m going to catch up.”

“Okay, then,” she said with a strained smile. She nudged the pile toward me and I carried it back to my cubicle. I opened my locker and placed the manuscript on the bottom, next to an umbrella and a growing accumulation of Tupperware that needed to be washed and taken home. I piled the early copies of The Girl from Pendeen on top of the manuscript and closed the locker door.

I ALWAYS went to Pasadena for Christmas, but this year I could not tear myself away from New York. I told my parents the only lie I could think of that was big enough to justify missing the holiday, but which would not cause them to book the first flight out to New York. I said I’d met someone, and we had decided to spend the holiday together in the city. Oh, my parents were so happy! Yes, I absolutely, must stay in New York! We should enjoy Christmas just the two of us! How giddy they became, how altogether unable to conceal the things they hoped for: That I would marry, and give them grandchildren, so that they might enjoy the sweet pastures of old age. After all, I was their only hope. Their enthusiasm made it utterly transparent that they feared they would be let down by me, that they worried I would remain alone. I was furious with them, and yet my heart broke for them, for the ordinary happiness they still hoped would be theirs.

“Tell us about this guy,” my father said.

“What do you want to know?”

“Throw us a bone, Em, what’s he like?”

“I guess he’s a lot like me.”

I ate a hefty cancellation fee on my flight and bought a knee-high artificial tree, which only made my apartment even more dismal. Two days before Christmas, a package arrived—panettone and peppermint bark from Williams-Sonoma.

For you and your “special friend.”

With love, mom.

CHRISTMAS IN New York: tinsel snowflakes on lampposts, holiday markets popping up like toadstools, infinite off-key renditions of “Silver Bells” on subway platforms—saxophone, mariachi, marimba. On Christmas Eve, I went to the newly opened Whole Foods in Gowanus and purchased the fixings for a Christmas dinner for one: a single filet mignon, a potato, sprigs of rosemary, a handful of haricots verts. A ruse, a performance for my own audience—I had no intention of staying home. I halfheartedly snapped the ends off a few beans, then grabbed my coat and headed out.

The Little Sweet was open, though nearly empty. Vincia stood behind the steam table as usual and a few men hunched over their regular tables. In the corner by the potted palm, Clive sat reading the Daily News.

I’d thought that seeing I had nowhere to be on Christmas might soften Vincia to me, but I was mistaken. (You do have somewhere to be, you just chose not to go, I scolded myself, but I believed completely in my own sorry aloneness.) She took my money with the same cordial displeasure as always. Though I had been hoping for a reprieve from her surliness, I found myself grateful not to receive it. I took my tray, nodded my thanks, and made my way across the restaurant to Clive’s table.

“You, too?” I asked.

“Afraid so.”

We ate in quiet fellowship. When Clive finished his Carib, he bought two more, one for each of us. We smiled and bounced our heads when “Feliz Navidad” came on the radio, belched softly as we drank our beer. It grew late. Across the street, eerily quiet on this night, a man pulled the grate down over the storefront of the grocery. One by one, the other patrons departed the Little Sweet, until Clive and I were the only ones who remained. When Vincia began wiping down the steam table, Clive looked at me hesitantly. “Would you care to walk?”

We stopped at a bodega to buy tallboys of Bud Light.

“A toast!” I declared, raising my can with a wry smile.

“Happy bloody Christmas,” Clive said.