Boston marks a new beginning for Eric and becomes the urban setting of Andrew’s life after Vermont. It is also tied to the attack that leaves Andrew with lasting trauma and eventually brings a gun back into the couple’s apartment.

Eric’s Move and Adult Life

After coming out, Eric’s parents refused to pay for his final semester of college. He couch-surfed with friends and worked at a sandwich shop for two years while continuing to speak with his parents, especially his mother. When they arrived in tears to apologize on the day he received his diploma, they gave him a check for the college bill and a little extra. Eric used it to move to Boston.

In Boston, Eric becomes a market analyst for Financeer. His ease with people also leads administrators and his department director to call on him to help mediate contentious meetings. The move thus follows a difficult period of financial uncertainty and family estrangement, but it leads into a professional life built partly on the social skills that had helped him through those earlier years.

Andrew’s Move and the Attack

Andrew also moves to Boston, where he renounces what he regards as Vermont things, including guns. That break does not hold after he is attacked in a bar near Boston Garden. Thirteen years before the events described, the assault leaves him feeling unmoored; the beer bottle striking the back of his head seems to have taken away a part of himself that has not returned.

Andrew responds by taking self-defense and boxing classes. They help him feel more empowered, and his nightmares become less frequent while his general anxiety decreases. Within a year of the attack, he obtains a Massachusetts gun license and firearm identification and joins a shooting range. His return to guns is not simply a return to his childhood interests: he privately imagines his attacker in the paper target’s silhouette, and shooting gives him a sense of relief he struggles to explain to Eric.

A City Bound to Safety and Unease

Boston connects the couple’s adult home to two different histories of vulnerability. For Eric, it is the destination enabled by a reconciliation with his parents; for Andrew, it is where a violent assault unsettles his sense of self and changes his attitude toward personal safety. Their later disagreement about keeping a gun in their apartment carries that history into family life: Eric initially resists, while Andrew sees shooting as a way to reclaim part of the person he was before the attack.