The cracked spine of my paperback *The Great Believers* still has sand stuck in it from that weekend in Galveston when I read the whole second half on a towel, ignoring the gulls and the sunburn creeping across my shoulders. The chapter where Yale sits in his empty Chicago apartment, cataloging everything he's lost piece by piece — his friends, his lover, his future — made me put the book down on my chest and just breathe for a long time. I thought about the boxes still unpacked in my own apartm