Page 43 of Seven Days in June

SHANE HALL WAS RUNNING FOR HIS LIFE.

The diner disaster had scrambled his brain. His heart was shredded. His stomach was in knots. In a former life, he would’ve dealt with this in dangerous ways. But due to his recent aggressive act of personal reinvention, he was no longer a drinker. He was a runner. A capital-Rrunner, and you knew he was serious, because he bought Nike Vaporflys, the sneakers the Olympics almost banned for giving runners an advantage. And he was wearing the Garmin Forerunner 945 GPS watch to monitor his pace in pro-marathoner style. Most notable, though, were his elite-grade compression socks, which were recommended by Usain Bolt in an oldEsquirehe’d dog-eared in some midwestern JetBlue VIP lounge. His gear was fire.

Shane didn’t half-ass anything. He ran as hard as he drank.

Never mind that in AA, he was warned of the dangers of cross-addiction—when you put down a drink and pick up a new obsession, like evangelism or multilevel-marketing schemes or rescuing pit bulls. And fine, Shane knew that his running habit bordered on extreme. But what new addictions could possibly scare him? Not having a drink was excruciating, and he beat that. Not having anything else would be easy.

So Shane ran and ran, until the steady, hypnotic rhythm of his footfalls and his modulated, focused breathing coaxed him into calm.

Because he’d had a day.

The sun was just about to set beyond the Upper Manhattan skyline, and Shane was trying to outrun it. He’d already run the six miles from his rental in the West Village, down the West Side Highway and around South Street Seaport. Now he was looping his way back up. At first, his pace was too aggressive, too swift—but for the past ten minutes or so, he’d started slowing a bit. He was right on the cusp of exhaustion. But that was what kept Shane going, that flicker of uncertainty, the threat of burning out.

And he had to keep going, because he wanted to be home before nightfall. He couldn’t be away from the apartment for longer than an hour. He’d told Eva to come by if she needed him. And ever since she’d fled, crying, from the diner that morning, he’d been waiting for her. He probably wouldn’t hear from her—but on the off chance that she wanted to talk, he had to be there.

He’d been the one to make her cry. It was what he always did, destroying the people he loved the most, the things that made him happiest. Seeing her that upset again, knowing he was the cause of it—it had triggered an old panic that was too deep-seated to shake. He had to fix it. He couldn’t let that be the last time they saw each other.

Chin down, eyes trained ahead of him, he blazed his way down the West Side Highway running path—the glittering Hudson River winding lazily to his left, with the New Jersey skyline stretching beyond it. It was thickly hot, the kind of heat that makes you listless and lethargic. Visibly drained tourists draped themselves over benches, while the path was crowded with barely moving senior joggers and mommy groups ambling by with designer strollers. Everyone but Shane was on chill mode.

Was it selfish to hope for even a second more of Eva’s time whenhewas the reason she wasn’t okay? Probably. Was it reckless and childish to have sent her all those texts? Fuck yes. But he’d analyzed the situation too many times since this morning, and he didn’t know what else to do.

I shouldn’t have come at all, thought Shane, almost colliding with a twenty-something couple who were somehow successfully jogging while sharing EarPods.

But he had come. He’d started another fire. This time, he’d stay and put it out.

Slowing his pace, Shane glanced up at the horizon to check the sunset. The predusk sky was vivid with waves of fuchsia and lavender, and not for the first time since getting clean, he was struck by how alive the world looked. He was suddenly so alert. It was how he’d been as a little kid, before he’d started anesthetizing himself. Back then, he’d felt things too deeply for his own good.

One time, while waiting in a Kmart checkout line, five-year-old Shane had seen some guy steal a waffle iron from a woman’s cart while she wasn’t looking. His mind had quietly spiraled over it. What if waffles were all she had to feed her thirteen badass kids because their dad squandered her modest bank-teller salary on fantasy-football bets and scratch cards?What if her life depended on that waffle iron?He’d obsessed about it for days.

And snakes used to ruin him. Just the idea of them. Shane couldn’t bear the thought of those delicate-looking reptiles trying their hardest to travel around their patch of forest while legless and footless. It broke his heart! They were so unfairly handicapped. He used to obsessively sketch pictures of snakes with four legs, until it occurred to him that he was, in fact, drawing lizards.

The world was too loud for little-boy Shane. What he didn’t know was that he was training himself to be a deeply empathetic writer—understanding nuanced emotion, spying humanity in unexpected places, seeing past the obvious. He was taking notes for his future self, who would write it all down. Every fucking thing he saw. And thank God he was good at it. If nothing else, writing helped organize the chaos in his brain—even if it had only come in four intense bursts over the past fifteen years.

I’m already thinking of my career in past tense, he realized, speeding up a bit.

Shane wrote his books hoping to smooth out the jagged edges of his life. Which didn’t exactly work. If reviewers were to be believed, his novels could rearrange the way a reader thought, sparking existential epiphanies. But he could never reach himself. In fact, his biggest triumphs were followed by his biggest benders. No matter how dizzying his professional highs, Shane just couldn’t resist the pull of the tide sweeping him out. Self-destruction was always imminent.

No, if writing had been the cure, the past fifteen years would’ve looked very different. He wouldn’t have taken so long to get sober. He might’ve picked a permanent place to live, put down actual roots. Invested in Seamless or Spotify. He’d have gotten serious about the business of living.

And he would’ve found Eva long ago.

Stretching ahead of Shane was Pier 25. Families swarmed the turf overlooking the water, taking pics or waiting to hop in rented kayaks. Shane glanced over at the dads with toddlers on their shoulders, while moms juggled cell phones, snacks, stuffed animals, and juice boxes in two hands. It was all so exotic. He’d always appreciated families from a distance, looked at them like they were a fascinating experiment: all that intimacy and domesticity couldn’t have been more foreign.

Maybe it was the disjointed way Shane grew up, but he didn’t know how to cultivate that sense of home. So he rejected it. He always lived alone, far from crowds and populated cities—especially ones that reminded him of DC—preferably near the ocean, and rarely longer than six months. Rentals only. There was a freedom in staying at places that weren’t his. Shane reveled in that vaguely disorienting vibe of bed-and-breakfasts, Airbnbs, somebody’s seaside shack—just-passing-through places where things were a little bit off. Lamps instead of overhead lighting. Sheets aggressively scented with some foreign fabric softener. Jumpy ceiling fans and dusty bookshelves with eclectic ’80s paperbacks (often historical westerns featuring covers with chesty women and sometimes a horse). It was impossible to get too comfortable in a place that kept reminding you it wasn’t yours.

And it was impossible for anyone to know him, either. Which was perfect. During his lost years, he hadn’t wanted people to see how unstable he was. Of course, sobriety had shown him that everyone was a little bit off. His shit was just closer to the surface.

What’s wrong with you?Eva had asked that first day. Shane had been fielding this question for years. But when Eva said it, it was the first time he’d actually given it any real thought. She’d asked with curiosity, not judgment.

Shane was a complete stranger and confessed to breaking his arm on purpose—but she didn’t write him off or condemn him or, worse, laugh. She didn’t try to convince him to stop. Eva’s generosity was stunning—she just wanted to know why.

And he would’ve told her. But back then, he couldn’t articulate the reasons why he did that to himself.

Keeping a steady pace, Shane powered past City Vineyard, the riverfront restaurant with its dazzling downtown skyline views and digital nomads sipping rosé in plastic glasses. The sweet, fermented scent ofbarwafted over him on the dry, hot breeze, driving him to run faster. With every heavy footfall, every forward swing of his upper body, the bones in his left forearm reverberated—a low thrum, just enough so he could never forget his old habit. And what, exactly, was wrong with him.

The first time it happened was when Shane was seven, the terrible event that had sent him hurtling from foster home to foster home, where he learned new crimes, new dysfunctions, new ways to be unloved. That was one piece of it. The other was every time he broke his arm, ithurt, but when it dulled, he’d be shot through with this remarkable insight about himself. It was the only time he saw who he was, crystal clear.

The second time, he was a third grader in a DC juvenile detention center, and a guard was mercilessly kicking his ass for sleeping through lunch. Shane kept fighting back, a mad-as-hell Mighty Mouse with rapid-fire fists. Finally, the guard knocked him off his feet with a quick, decimating blow to the jaw—and Shane purposely used his arm to break his fall. Bone, broken.

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