He was forty-four and had gone one full day without it on four separate occasions since January, each attempt announced to nobody. This one began Sunday night: he deleted the app, then wrote his own password on a scrap of paper and handed the paper to his brother, which felt for about an hour like a system rather than a feeling.

By Tuesday he was on the couch under a blanket in an eighty-degree apartment, sweating, watching a game he had no money on and finding it unwatchable, just men running around a field for no reason at all. He circled DAY 1 on the wall calendar because the marker was already sitting there. The 1 was written over an older 1, in green, from May.