Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self-the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach-were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose. "Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.