“There’s something you should know,” was how he would put it.

He would say this while she was doing something else—years later, in a Solana Beach cottage two blocks from the Pacific, Annie could still remember exactly where she’d been, what she’d been doing, the way one does looking back at a national tragedy. These were not national tragedies but at once less and more, news that struck to the bone, altering her immediate world more than a presidential assassination.

What Andrew remembered was how she stopped what she was doing and turned her full attention to him. She might tilt her head slightly, not unlike her dog, which often sat silently, observing him.

“There’s something you should know,” he said at the diner in Schuyler their second Sunday together. He had led her to the table with the Reserved card on it, the last booth in the window row that overlooked the street. This meant that people—the guys at the counter stretching a cup of coffee with the newspaper, two older couples treating themselves to a meal out—watched them as they sat down, the unwanted attention a tradeoff for Andrew’s view of the drug action in the park across the street. With or without an assignment, Andrew saw news everywhere.

Annie had worked a full day at the Observer on Saturday, and today she could see that Andrew had joined diner society—greetings, the table waiting, and when the waitress poured their coffee, Andrew gave her a $5 bill and she left the pot on a metal trivet she took from the pocket of her daisy apron.

Now their breakfast dishes had been cleared and they sat surrounded by the Times, Daily News and Post, with their headlines about Bill Clinton choosing Janet Reno for attorney general, and the Hudson County Observer, with its photo of a barn fire and news of thirty milk cows lost. Tina had told Annie to read each issue of the paper and mark up what could have been done better. They would talk about it this afternoon.

“She’s testing you,” said Andrew, with a flash of his gold tooth. “You know that, right?”

“Sometimes tests are fun.”

“And you’ll bowl her over. As you do every day.”

“That, I don’t know.”

“Every day. She thanks her lucky stars. Even when she’s yelling at you.”

With another twinkle of his gold molar, Andrew went outside and leaned against a lamppost, smoking, paging through the News, a little ferociously, rustling the paper and neglecting the ash on his cigarette. He returned to their table, bringing a simultaneous waft of fresh air and cigarette smoke that recalled Annie’s childhood; not a bad smell, she could get used to it again.

And he, in his first view of her from the door, thought how totally absorbed she was in what she was reading. Focused. Comfortable being alone.

“Does it ever get warm here?” he asked as he sat down.

“You just bought your sweater,” she said, indicating the navy-blue boiled wool. Not to mention three turtlenecks, three pairs of socks, and a set of long underwear; the owner of the sporting-goods store down the street had waved to them as they walked by.

“There’s something you should know,” he said.

She met his eyes, waiting.

“I’m ill,” he said.

She nodded.

“It’s obvious?”

“—Your wrists. They look like they’ve been through a grater.”

Before he could stop himself, he tugged at the sleeves of his sweater, just a flick of the third finger of each hand, ensuring coverage.

“But you didn’t ask,” he said.

“I’m not reporting on you.”

“Still. Conjecture is dangerous.”

“We’re talking about you. Manic-depressive?”

She’s ready, he thought. Go ahead.

“I wish. I seem to be imbued with the standard despair, alternated with a crashing mental pain, a sort of agonizing migraine all over my body. That’s what persuaded me to break through a window with my hands so I could grab a piece of glass and try to cut out my heart. It had given me nothing but pain.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, as if he had shared news of a death.

“It’s over now. I did time in a hospital, met a good shrink, and today I’m a mix of the latest in pharmacology and talking therapy, a sort of mental bionic man. A different person from what I was . . . two years ago.”

“Do you like that? I mean, are you happy as him, this new person?”

“—Well, he’s smarter than I was. And he doesn’t refer to himself in the third person. I’m functional—in most ways. There are still a few details to be worked out, but hey, I’m a nice guy.”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“—I decided to survive, Annie. Rewind, restart.”

He had given his health, almost his life in Central America, for the Cuscútlano revolution because he believed in it. In exchange, the Times took him off the story, and then the job—no longer impartial, the newspaper said, no longer objective, but the paper had put him on the ground, and he had reported what he saw.

Pushed out by the Times, he had joined that side until malaria and insanity almost killed him. Today, to his surprise, he found himself still alive, not in prison or a psychiatric ward or dead half a dozen times but living in an apartment in New York City like an ordinary person, reminded daily of the paper’s power, but never mind, right now he was courting a smart, pretty woman who wanted to spend time with him, in Schuyler, this strange little burg that you could walk from end to end in twenty minutes.

“Some people—people I thought were friends”—deplored this new normal life of his. They wanted him drunk, running around, making a lot of noise. True friends didn’t want that, he told himself, and

“Not me,” she said.

“Thank you.” I love you. “Other friends—and my shrink—point out that we didn’t compromise in Cuscútlan. That there’s no reason to hate myself. Another new concept.”

“—This new person. You. Does it last?”

“As far as anyone knows.”

This time her eyes left his.

“It’s a treatment, Annie. And they come up with new meds every day. Well, every year.”

Across the street, in a narrow window on the third story of a red brick building, stood one sunflower in a bright blue vase. It must be plastic, but Annie had enjoyed noticing it, and thinking about the person—a woman, surely—who had put the flower in the vase and put the vase in the window and thought, there, that looks better. In the clarity of the window and the pale winter sun on the dusty-rose brick and the plastic sunflower she thought, he will leave me.

“Dígame,” he said. Talk to me.

“  . . . Cowboy Junkies.” The group had popped into her mind, and Andrew needed only two beats.  “‘Mama, he’s crazy and he scares me,’” he sang softly. He took her hand on the tabletop. “That girl doesn’t run.”

Annie didn’t run either. She kissed him at the train station, got through the meeting with Tina, and at home she listened to “Misguided Angel” once, because they were a disappointing band, she could never get through the whole CD, and she wished mightily that he hadn’t told her this, and of course he had to tell her, so she wished she had someone she could ask, is this OK?

Ed would say no, find someone normal, but if Ed were alive, he would be jealous of Andrew.

Is he a danger to others? Jamie would ask, and Annie, the inadequate reporter, had forgotten to follow up on that. And she hadn’t asked about his wrists because—because by the time you got to your forties, you had a history, a story, and if his wrists sent a shiver through her core, and his pills chilled that same core—the way he took them to a timer on his watch, dry, if there wasn’t any water around, barely looking at them, knowing them so intimately—well, he would tell her when he was ready, as he had.

And because “you’ve done depressed,” George would say, remembering his friend Ed. “I had hoped for someone cheerful for you.”

And she would be reduced to saying, but I like him. And he believes in me.

Debby Mayer writes “Travels with Sizzle,” on Substack—decidedly not a sweet dog story (https://travelswithsizzle.substack.com/archive?sort=new). She has published a novel, Sisters (Putnam’s, Berkley); a memoir, Riptides (Epigraph); numerous short stories, including in The New Yorker and Redbook; and reams of community journalism. She received two grants from the NY Foundation for the Arts. More at debbymayer.com.