He slouched into the chair across from him. “What’re you doing?”

Jude didn’t look up. “Making more gougères,” he said, calmly. “One of the batches I made yesterday isn’t quite right.”

“No one’s going to fucking care, Jude,” he said meanly, and then, barreling helplessly forward, “We could just give them cheese sticks and it’d be the same thing.”

Jude shrugged, and Willem felt his annoyance quicken into anger. Here Jude sat after what was, he could now admit, a terrifying night, acting as if nothing had happened, even as his bandage-wrapped hand lay uselessly on the table. He was about to speak when Jude put down the water glass he’d been using as a pastry cutter and looked at him. “I’m really sorry, Willem,” he said, so softly that Willem almost couldn’t hear him. He saw Willem looking at his hand and pulled it into his lap. “I should never—” He paused. “I’m sorry. Don’t be mad at me.”

His anger dissolved. “Jude,” he asked, “what were you doing?”

“Not what you think. I promise you, Willem.”

Years later, Willem would recount this conversation—its contours, if not its actual, literal content—for Malcolm as proof of his own incompetence, his own failure. How might things have been different if he spoke only one sentence? And that sentence could have been “Jude, are you trying to kill yourself?” or “Jude, you need to tell me what’s going on,” or “Jude, why do you do this to yourself?” Any of those would have been acceptable; any of those would have led to a larger conversation that would have been reparative, or at the very least preventative.

Wouldn’t it?

But there, in the moment, he instead only mumbled, “Okay.”

They sat in silence for what felt like a long time, listening to the murmur of one of their neighbors’ televisions, and it was only much later that Willem would wonder whether Jude had been saddened or relieved that he had been so readily believed.

“Are you mad at me?”

“No.” He cleared his throat. And he wasn’t. Or, at least, mad was not the word he would have chosen, but he couldn’t then articulate what word would be correct. “But we obviously have to cancel the party.”

At this, Jude looked alarmed. “Why?”

“Why? Are you kidding me?”

“Willem,” Jude said, adopting what Willem thought of as his litigatory tone, “we can’t cancel. People are going to be showing up in seven hours—less. And we really have no clue who JB’s invited. They’re going to show up anyway, even if we let everyone else know. And besides”—he inhaled sharply, as if he’d had a lung infection and was trying to prove it had resolved itself—“I’m perfectly fine. It’ll be more difficult if we cancel than if we just go forward.”

Oh, how and why did he always listen to Jude? But he did, once again, and soon it was eight, and the windows were once again open, and the kitchen was once again hot with pastry—as if the previous night had never happened, as if those hours had been an illusion—and Malcolm and JB were arriving. Willem stood in the door of their bedroom, buttoning up his shirt and listening to Jude tell them that he had burned his arm baking the gougères, and that Andy had had to apply a salve.

“I told you not to make those fucking gougères,” he could hear JB say, happily. He loved Jude’s baking.

He was overcome, then, with a powerful sensation: he could close the door, and go to sleep, and when he woke, it would be a new year, and everything would be wiped fresh, and he wouldn’t feel that deep, writhing discomfort inside of him. The thought of seeing Malcolm and JB, of interacting with them and smiling and joking, seemed suddenly excruciating.

But, of course, see them he did, and when JB demanded they all go up to the roof so he could get some fresh air and have a smoke, he let Malcolm complain uselessly and halfheartedly about how cold it was without joining in, before resignedly following the three of them up the narrow staircase that led to the tar-papered roof.

He knew that he was sulking, and he removed himself to the back of the building, letting the others talk without him. Above him, the sky was already completely dark, midnight dark. If he faced north, he could see directly beneath him the art-supply store where JB had been working part-time since quitting the magazine a month ago, and in the distance, the Empire State Building’s gaudy, graceless bulk, its tower aglow with a garish blue light that made him think of gas stations, and the long drive back to his parents’ house from Hemming’s hospital bed so many years ago.

“Guys,” he called over to the others, “it’s cold.” He wasn’t wearing his coat; none of them were. “Let’s go.” But when he went to the door that opened into the building’s stairwell, the handle wouldn’t turn. He tried it again—it wouldn’t budge. They were locked out. “Fuck!” he shouted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

“Jesus, Willem,” said Malcolm, startled, because Willem rarely got angry. “Jude? Do you have the key?”

But Jude didn’t. “Fuck!” He couldn’t help himself. Everything felt so wrong. He couldn’t look at Jude. He blamed him, which was unfair. He blamed himself, which was more fair but which made him feel worse. “Who’s got their phone?” But idiotically, no one had his phone: they were down in the apartment, where they themselves should have been, were it not for fucking JB, and for fucking Malcolm, who so unquestioningly followed everything JB said, every stupid, half-formed idea, and for fucking Jude as well, for last night, for the past nine years, for hurting himself, for not letting himself be helped, for frightening and unnerving him, for making him feel so useless: for everything.

For a while they screamed; they pounded their feet on the rooftop in the hopes that someone beneath them, one of their three neighbors whom they’d still never met, might hear them. Malcolm suggested throwing something at the windows of one of the neighboring buildings, but they had nothing to throw (even their wallets were downstairs, tucked cozily into their coat pockets), and all the windows were dark besides.

“Listen,” Jude said at last, even though the last thing Willem wanted to do was listen to Jude, “I have an idea. Lower me down to the fire escape and I’ll break in through the bedroom window.”

The idea was so stupid that he initially couldn’t respond: it sounded like something that JB would imagine, not Jude. “No,” he said, flatly. “That’s crazy.”

“Why?” asked JB. “I think it’s a great plan.” The fire escape was an unreliable, ill-conceived, and mostly useless object, a rusted metal skeleton affixed to the front of the building between the fifth and third floors like a particularly ugly bit of decoration—from the roof, it was a drop of about nine feet to the landing, which ran half the width of their living room; even if they could safely get Jude down to it without triggering one of his episodes or having him break his leg, he’d have to crane over its edge in order to reach the bedroom window.

“Absolutely not,” he told JB, and the two of them argued for a bit until Willem realized, with a growing sense of dismay, that it was the only possible solution. “But not Jude,” he said. “I will.”

“You can’t.”

“Why? We won’t need to break in through the bedroom, anyway; I’ll just go in through one of the living-room windows.” The living-room windows were barred, but one of them was missing, and Willem thought he might be able to squeeze between the remaining two bars, just. Anyway, he’d have to.

“I closed the windows before we came up here,” Jude admitted in a small voice, and Willem knew that meant he’d also locked them, because he locked anything that could be: doors, windows, closets. It was reflexive for him. The bedroom window’s lock was broken, however, so Jude had fashioned a mechanism—a complex, blocky thing made from bolts and wire—that he claimed secured it completely.