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[...] My mother goes out to make coffee, and I look at my sleeping father’s back. Suddenly I see that he is aged and tired. There’s nothing definite to point to, it’s just an impression that I get. My father is fifty-five years old, and I’ve never known him as young. My mother was first young, and …

“I—” Platt goggled at me. “Kitsey.” He seemed rattled. He dug his hands in the bellows pockets of his field coat. “She’s been held up,” he said to his mother.

Mrs. Barbour looked startled. “Oh,” she said. They looked at each other and some unspoken something seemed to pass between them.

“Held…

“Right,” I said politely, going into the kitchen and pouring myself a huge vodka. [...]

[...]Whatever reason I’d had for storing the painting all those years ago—for keeping it in the first place—for taking it out of the museum even—I now couldn’t remember. Time had blurred it. It was part of a world that didn’t exist—or, rather, it was as if I lived in two worlds, and the storage loc…

I’d worked out how to quit for good, if I wanted to: steep taper, seven day timetable, plenty of loperamide; magnesium supplements and free form amino acids to replenish my burnt-out neurotransmitters; protein powder, electrolyte powder, melatonin (and weed) for sleep as well as various herbal tinc…