I found the date book-thin with a maroon cover embossed in gold. A gift from Forester, I suddenly remembered. “One second, please.” I cupped the phone between my ear and shoulder and rifled through the pages for the end of October. I tried to think whether I had any meetings tomorrow, maybe a court call.

But as I reached the right page, everything blurred in front of me, because I realized it didn’t matter. Whatever I had to do tomorrow wasn’t important, not even a little bit, compared to Sam. And Forester.

I closed the book. “I’ll be there.”

Sam Hollings walked down Duval Street, sidestepping a woman sitting on the curb, talking on her cell phone, then one block later a pack of college kids pouring out of a bar, all drunk and happy and loud.

Sam gave the kids a wide berth. He hated how far away from them he felt, how much older. He easily remembered when getting loaded on a Wednesday night was not uncommon. God, the simplicity of those days, so unappreciated at the time. He was grateful for it now, feeling ancient and well past them.

He would have to remember to write in his journal about this sudden feeling of being old. He’d packed the journal, knowing he might be alone for a while, knowing the things he used to talk about to Izzy would have to remain silent, without a listener.

He kept walking up Duval, looking for a restaurant that wasn’t bellowing Jimmy Buffett, one that didn’t scream its name in neon lights. He was exhausted from the two days of driving, and he wanted something quiet and comfortable. But finding this was more difficult than he’d thought.

He and Izzy used to talk about coming to Key West. They’d expected it to be charming and eccentric. Being here, it felt more like a Disneyland version of the Key West they’d envisioned. The commercialization of the place was rampant-each place boasted specialized frozen drinks and key-lime pie. The T-shirt stores bled one into another.

Finally, Sam found a restaurant in an old house set back from the street and flanked by a wraparound porch. He accepted a menu from the maître d’ and allowed himself to be seated outside, his back to the door. He started to order a Blue Moon beer, then changed his mind. He drank Blue Moons with his buddies, with Izzy. He drank Blue Moon when he was happy. His Blue Moon days were over for now.

He ordered a glass of cabernet. Cabernet was what his asshole father used to drink. It felt, vaguely, as if he was punishing himself by ordering such a glass. When the glass was delivered, he stared at the blood-red of the wine, thinking about his dad, wondering if there was a reason he had used his fists on his family. It struck Sam now, in the middle of what he was doing, that maybe there were complicated reasons for just about any bad act. Maybe, for example, his father, by being a fighting man, was taking out frustrations that none of his family could understand, that no one could understand.

That might be true, Sam realized. His father might have had his own reasons for acting the way he did. There was a reason, for example, why he was here. He had to hang on to that idea, because it was too late to turn back now.

That night, with the bedside lamp the only light on in the house, I lay awake for a long, long time, Sam’s side of the bed vast and cold. I tried to think of real possibilities about where he could be, of what had happened to him. I thought of Maggie earlier, saying he could be dead. Wasn’t it only realistic to acknowledge this could be true? I wanted, desperately, to be logical. If I applied logic, maybe this wouldn’t hurt so much, maybe it wouldn’t be happening, maybe I could simply figure it out.

And right then, I was able to think logically about Sam being dead. I batted the concept around in my head. I imagined him, eyes closed, arms crossed over his chest. He’d be wearing the awful suit with the naval buttons his mother had bought him. His hair would be parted wrong.

Imagining this was easy because, the truth was, I didn’t believe it. I didn’t have any innate sense that the man I’d spent the last few years with was no longer in this world.

It was more likely that Sam was not dead, but rather sunning his annoyingly cute ass in Panama somewhere. I tried to imagine what Panama looked like. Jungly, perhaps? I saw Sam in a safari tent, attended by local women in Tarzan-like getups. Or was it beachy? I pictured Sam on a plush lounge chair, facing out toward crashing, blue waves, the bright sun turning his hair white. While he sat, he was counting the money he’d made-stolen, I should say.

I turned over in bed and pushed my face into the pillow. Was that true? Was Sam out there, wherever that was, already moving on to a new life? A new identity? A new girl? It didn’t sound like the Sam I knew. And I could have sworn I knew that guy inside and out. But then maybe you can’t know everything about a person. He hadn’t known, for example, that I was scratching at the walls of my own wedding, wanting out. I hadn’t said anything; I hadn’t even written an e-mail-This thing is getting to me. What about you?

Then it occurred to me-Sam’s e-mail. Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I knew his passwords.

I launched myself out of bed and scurried through the dark apartment to the second bedroom, the room I used as an office.

I clicked on the desk lamp and turned on the computer, impatient with how long it took to power up. Finally, I got on the Internet and typed in GoToMyPC, which Sam used to get onto his work e-mail.

At the site, I typed in Sam’s password-grubber 1228. “Grubber” was a type of kick used in rugby; 1228 was the address of the house his family lived in when he was a kid.

I drummed my fingers on the desk while it took an interminably long time to connect to Sam’s work computer. I’d seen Sam do this hundreds of times, and it had never seemed so long.

Finally, the site appeared to be connecting to Sam’s e-mail, but then a message popped up-Invalid e-mail address or password.

Had he changed the password? I tried again. Same message.

Then it dawned on me. Sam’s e-mail access had been shut down by Carrington & Associates. He probably no longer had a job there. Or maybe it had been done by the cops, the feds. I sat back hard, breathless by how swiftly everything had changed.

I remembered Sam had a Yahoo! account he used occasionally, usually for personal messages or things he didn’t want to send through his work e-mail.

I got onto Yahoo! and typed his grubber password again. And, voila, there was Sam’s in-box.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary. It seemed it hadn’t been checked since Monday, the day before he disappeared. I clicked on the Sent folder. Sam had sent a few e-mails from Yahoo! last week. I let my eyes roam the names there. I bristled when I came to one in particular-Alyssa Thornton.

Alyssa was Sam’s ex-girlfriend, a woman whom I’d met once at his ten-year high-school reunion. Before that, Sam hadn’t described her except to say that she’d wanted more out of their relationship than he did. They stayed together for a year or two in college then broke up. Until the reunion, I’d never given Alyssa much thought. I wasn’t the jealous type, and I knew how much Sam loved me. But then I met her. She was standing at the bar when we walked into the reunion, and she was looking directly at Sam, as if she’d been expecting him, as if she’d been standing there for years waiting for him to arrive.

She was ethereal, stunning and bony as a bag of doorknobs. With her white-blond hair, she almost looked like a miniature, female version of Sam. I could immediately picture them together as the golden couple. Alyssa was dressed in a silvery minidress. On me, the dress would have made me look like a cheap, life-size Christmas ornament, but on her it only made her look like a tiny silver light, shimmering amidst the commoners. And she was nice, too, which only made it tougher to stand there and talk to her and accept the fact that Alyssa still loved Sam. She glowed when she gazed at him. Just like I did.