YOU GET FAR ENOUGH INTO winter and you no longer believe it was ever warm or ever will be again. The trees seem as unalive as the other fixtures of the city’s sidewalks: newspaper boxes, abandoned bicycles, hydrants (their tops covered now in little ushankas of snow). During the day, the light seems filtered through a dishrag, and by late afternoon, day is gone; the surrendering blue of a four o’clock twilight becomes your whole world.

When I try to get myself back into that winter, to reenter my psychic state during those frozen months, I find that I can no longer do it. I can remember that period in an external way, using the things I did and said to reconstruct what I must have felt. But I can no longer inhabit those memories as I can inhabit even more distant ones: Sipping espresso with Aunt Caroline in the Place des Vosges. My skin peeling in the days after Alison’s death. Me say day me say day me say day. The best I can do is to describe how the world around me seemed altered. Before that time, the city was for me what I believe it is for most people: a commons, all of us grazing together in its glass-and-steel meadows, a place the most salient feature of which is not, in the end, its skyscrapers or its cacophony, but the excruciating and ecstatic demands it places upon our empathy. To push through the crowds in the Times Square subway station, zigging by tourists with suitcases, zagging around bankers in suits, brushing past people hawking churros, EPs, God, veering around a troupe of young men performing backflips above the hard tile floor, and squeezing onto a train so packed your chest compresses in the crush of bodies, and to know that every one of these people is in the thick of a life every bit as complex as your own, that you are all extras in one another’s dramas—isn’t this the quintessence of urban life? But during those months, it was different. The city seemed not public but private, a place created for me and the things that were playing out in my life. New York was mere backdrop, a screen painted with buildings and delivery trucks and dog-walkers and children on scooters, in front of which I enacted my life. I did not care what people around me thought of me because I did not entirely believe they were real. On the subway I bit my nails with impunity; I traced words in the air without bothering to disguise my behavior.

The significance of Clive’s pilgrimage to Manhattan Beach was clear to me. He had been marking Alison’s death. It had been months since I had entered his life, and I knew it was time to move things forward. Either I’d gained his trust or I hadn’t, and it was time to find out. Every night before I stepped into the Little Sweet, I promised myself this was the night I would press him, the night I would bring the conversation around to the secrets of his past. But these were false promises; even as I made them I don’t think I believed them. Instead, I spent our evenings lamenting the hideous condo tower rising on Fifty-seventh Street. We groused about the disastrous snow removal after the most recent storm. Clive explained to me the workings of cricket and the Windies’ tumultuous history of shame and glory. On the walk home afterward, I would excoriate myself for my cowardice, though I knew it wasn’t really cowardice preventing me, but something else, something I wouldn’t be able to fully understand for a long time. In truth, I had altogether lost sight of the purpose of my time with Clive Richardson. The winter, these nights, this man—it stretched on and on. I could see no end in sight.

I GUESS what happened next was inevitable. On a Tuesday in early February, I called in sick at work. Tuesdays were Clive’s day off, and I spent this one trailing him as he ran various errands. The next morning when I arrived at work, my boss called me into her office. As I sat across from her, she proceeded to describe to me the events of the day prior. Astrid Teague had come in for a marketing meeting. When she was ready to leave, it was sleeting, but she didn’t have an umbrella. My boss took her over to my cubicle, hoping to lend her one, and in my locker, amid an accumulation of dirty Tupperware, they discovered the stack of copies of The Girl from Pendeen which I had never mailed, along with the untouched manuscript by the debut novelist, which my boss would now have to edit herself in a hurry.

I was told to pack my things. I did so quickly. I removed the pushpins that had for the past four years affixed my photographs and decorations to the wall. I gathered my belongings from my locker. Everyone around me was very quiet. My coworkers avoided walking by my cubicle, except for the few who made a point of it, stealing pitying glances at me as they passed. I think this was when I understood that I would lose things in pursuit of the truth that I could not get back, that my life might be derailed in ways I could not recover from.

I COULDN’T tell my parents I had been fired. How on earth would I explain it to them? I couldn’t tell Jackie. She had given up on me—there had been no texts, no attempted interventions, since the morning I brushed her off at my apartment. The only person I could talk to was Clive. That night, when I told him I had lost my job, he said the usual comforting things. It happens to everyone at some point. I would find another. That old chestnut: “Everything works out for the best.”

“You can’t actually believe that,” I said.

He cocked his head back. “I guess not.” He furrowed his brow, chuckled.

I began to cry, tears that were at once utterly genuine and a command performance. “What should I do?” I reached for his hand, and he took mine in his. He stroked the inside of my wrist with his fingertips. When our gazes met, it seemed they were both filled with the same question. I leaned toward him. I closed my eyes.

It is impossible to say how much of this action was strategy and how much of it was desire. These two tracks had collapsed in on each other. I had reached a level of cognitive dissonance that seems almost impossible to me now, but of which I had only the most submersed, peripheral awareness then: I simultaneously trusted and distrusted Clive Richardson absolutely. I loved him and loathed him. I wanted to destroy him and was terrified of losing him.

Clive dropped my hand. He leaned away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I blurted.

His eyes darted from the floor to the television to the table, looking at anything but me.

“God, I’m a shit show tonight,” I said, wiping the tears from my eyes. “Can we just pretend that never happened?” I attempted a lighthearted smile.

“I’m sorry if I—” His gaze had fallen on my hand.

I shoved it under the table. “A cramp.” I’d been doing it without even realizing, tracing a finger through the air: N-e-v-e-r. N-e-v-e-r. N-e-v-e-r. He looked warily at me, and a rush of embarrassment flooded me.

“I think we could both use a drink,” I said. I got up and went to the counter and bought two cans of Carib.

When I turned to walk back to our table, Clive was gone.

HE WASN’T there the next night, or the next. I sat at the Little Sweet alone, lingering until closing in case he should appear. By the fourth night, I was in a panic. I had pushed things too far, driven him away with the very expressions of intimacy with which I’d hoped to pull him closer.

“Clive hasn’t been around lately,” I said casually to Vincia on the fifth night of his absence, as if I were merely making conversation. She pursed her lips and continued scooping rice onto a plate. “Do you know if he’s, like, away or something?”

“I know if he didn’t tell you, it’s none of your business.”

After that, I didn’t go inside the Little Sweet. I spent hours every night walking the streets, looping past his building to see if he would emerge, which he never did. Back in my apartment, I occupied the liminal space between sleeping and waking all night long, and in the mornings I couldn’t say for sure whether I’d slept at all. I had nowhere to be during the day. I returned to Alison’s diaries, searching her voice for some hint of where to go from here. I roamed the streets of Manhattan, looking in every taxi for his face.

As the days without Clive wore on, a vision of who I was and would be from then on began to sharpen in my mind. I was not one of the city’s bright young things after all, but one of its invisibles. You know the kind of person I mean. You see me hauling myself up the subway stairs in the summer heat, or down them in winter with bags of groceries banging against my knees. You see my brown parka, which is not even utilitarian but actively—intentionally, it seems to you—ugly, and if you are a person with a full and busy life, you cannot even understand the logic behind such a sartorial choice, and the life behind such logic, except to feel sorry but also, well, irritated—all the lonely people clogging the world, making you see them when all you want to do is take the subway home and deal with your own problems and engage in your own small pleasures. Don’t you deserve that? Well, sure, you do.

A WEEK later, when I looked in the storefront at the Little Sweet through a light snowfall and saw Clive sitting at his usual table, I thought I was imagining it. He looked up and spotted me through the glass. He smiled and waved.

“You were gone,” I said as I took my seat across from him.

“I had some things to take care of. Did you miss me?” He smiled jokily.