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commentaries he’d heard and read after 9/11. The day when everything changed forever. We will never be the same again . People seemed to really believe that bullshit, to want it to be so, as if they’d been yearning for some great and terrible event to tear them from their empty pursuit of stuff and the money to buy it, from their trivial amusements, their shallow celebrity worship, their love of titillating scandals, Monica Lewinsky blowing the president in the Oval Office. But the bustle through which he passed, young men and women scurrying by with iPod buds pinned to their ears, babbling into cell phones, signified that the cataclysm that was supposed to have changed everything had changed nothing, except for the families of those slaughtered on that exquisite morning. And for the soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Otherwise New York and America had moved on. It was important in America to move on, to avoid living in the past. That, Castle supposed, made him somewhat un-American. He could not help but live in the past; it clung to him like a second skin.
    His sour discontent extended to his forthcoming appointment with Ms. Hartley, his counselor or therapist or whatever she was. Her platitudes and banalities, which her mellow Lauren Bacall voice wrapped in a cloak of profundity, grated on him. Nevertheless he was going to see her, partly out of habit—he’d been attending two sessions a week for some eight or nine months, one alone with her, one with a group—and partly to keep his two daughters at bay. After the disaster Jay Strauss, head of his firm’s retail division, had told him to take some time off to “get yourself back together.” Morgan and Justine had become alarmed by his behavior during his leave. This sociable father of theirs, this neatnik who always tied a perfect Windsor knot and never wore the same suit twice in a row, had turned into a minor-league Howard Hughes, secluding himself in his house, going without shaving or showering for days on end, letting his hair grow long. To their minds, his unhygienic reclusiveness was evidence that far from getting himself together, he was coming further apart. Clearly an intervention was warranted.
    It was Morgan, the elder and a devout believer in the nostrums of the therapeutic culture, who had found the House of Hope on the Internet. This clinic that offered counseling to the bereaved was just what he needed, she said. He had to realize that he wasn’t alone; by sharing his suffering, he would relieve it. He’d resisted her urgings to sign up. He could not think Amanda’s name without breaking into tears; to utter it aloud to a stranger was unimaginable. Even the name of the place sounded ridiculous—the House of Hope, like you went there for hope as you might go to IHOP for pancakes. Morgan, however, was used to having her way; she’d always been like that, and her job as a literary publicist—importuning reluctant newspaper editors to interview her authors, bookstore managers to set up readings and signings—had honed the trait. She roped her sister into her campaign. Jussie was in her second year at Columbia Law and employed reasoned arguments to reinforce Morgan’s strident nagging. The sibling tag-team at last pummeled him into submission. How odd. His girls had become the parents, he the child.
    The thirtyish Ms. Hartley was kind and earnest and much given to the cant of her profession: healing and closure and the grieving process, as if grief were something like digestion. Castle was sure she had never known grief from the inside, never felt its iron grip. Most of her advice was useless, like her suggestion that he cut his leave of absence short and return to work. She assured him that reestablishing familiar routines would do him a world of good. It did not. Nor did the presence of others in his group who had lost spouses make him feel less alone, any more than his own presence made them feel less alone. He’d discovered that