Excerpt from Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I felt my heart tighten in my chest. Yes, his right eye looked weird. His pupil was bizarrely dilated, so large and black that I could barely see the beautiful green of his iris. But the strangest thing was the asymmetry of it—only the right eye was dilated, the left eye appeared completely normal.

"I can't see anything out of it." Dave blinked, casting a listless glance around the plane.

I sat up straighter, any residual sleepiness entirely gone. "Open the shade; see if the bright light makes it contract."

Dave lifted the window shade, blinking out at the clear view of coming evening from 30,000 feet high. Outside, the last rays of early-summer sunlight pierced a low cloud cover. Dave turned back to me, shaking his head. "I can't see anything."

Alarmed, I threw out the most outrageous, most hyperbolic question I could think of. I went for the worst, lobbing my darkest fear so that it could be debunked with Dave's reply of "No, that's ridiculous," and a laugh of dismissal. I asked: "Dave, are you having a stroke?"

"Maybe," he replied, his voice eerily quiet.

My heart dropped. Dave was not an alarmist. I tend to be the alarmist, convinced that a swollen gland is cancer or a persistent cough is surely pneumonia. But Dave never gets ruffled about that sort of thing. In fact, it would frustrate me sometimes, how hard I had to work to ruffle him when I was convinced that I had some freak medical condition (I had accurately self-diagnosed a hernia a few years prior, and I believed that that entitled me to at least a few years of self-righteous medical opinions). But Dave rarely went for it; I guess after you've seen enough gunshot wounds and car accidents, you learn how to not sweat the small stuff.

And yet, Dave was clearly alarmed now. And that realization—that was scary.

"I'm going to get help, be right back." I shot up out of my seat and ran to the rear of the plane, charging toward the unsuspecting Alaska Airlines flight attendant. "You need to make an announcement—we need a medical professional. My husband can't see a thing, and his right eye is weirdly dilated."

The flight attendant, a petite woman with tidy blond hair and a wide, kind face, read the alarm on my features and mirrored it back to me. "What seat are you in, honey?" I told her, and she picked up the cabin phone to make the announcement over the loudspeaker, asking for any medical professional aboard the flight to meet us at Dave's seat.

As it turned out, there was a nurse seated right behind us, and she hopped into our row and began speaking to Dave. I returned to our row in time to see her questioning him: "Close your left eye, look just with your right eye. Now, how many fingers am I holding up?"

"I can't tell," Dave answered, his voice vacant, unnaturally quiet. And then he shut his eyes. Fell asleep, without ceremony or pronouncement. Just like that, he was gone. I did not know it then, but it would be a very long time before Dave came back.

Chapter 2

New Haven, Connecticut
September 2003

It was not exactly love at first sight. In fact, in the beginning, I got Dave Levy all wrong.

We met for the first time in the early autumn of our freshman year. "Camp Yale" is what it is called, a manic and fabulous time right before classes begin, when everyone on the freshman quad is buzzing about, wide-eyed and name-tagged, working hard to set course schedules and learn building names. All interactions in those first few weeks unfold around valiant efforts to find commonalities, exploratory questions to sniff one another out, efforts to gauge whether initial and tenuous points of connection might potentially bloom into genuine friendship.

Oh, you're from Annapolis? My roommate is from Baltimore! Do you know her?

Oh, you're interested in ancient Greek philosophy? I loved My Big Fat Greek Wedding!

Excerpted from Beauty in the Broken Places by Allison Pataki. Copyright © 2018 by Allison Pataki. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.