“There’s nothing wrong with pleasuring yourself,” Odilie answered. It wasn’t like Peri to admonish herself like this. It threw Odilie off-kilter, made her want to dunk herself to the very bottom of the ocean and stay there, eat the sand, gnaw at a scuttling hermit crab.

But Peri grabbed her, in that viselike grip, shared other withering, starless secrets. “My mother would beat my father, throw things at him. Like glasses, picture frames. We would all hear it. Once, she made us watch as she scorched his fingers with a candle, grabbed his hand and told him he had to teach his kids how to withstand pain. He didn’t flinch. I almost thought he enjoyed it, all the agony. He loved her. She never touched us. Once I saw him in the bathroom and he had welts on his back the size of nickels. Pain, it can be white light and make you greedy, for both the giver and receiver.” She pulled out a green tendril from the water, a sea plant, bit into one of the bulbous ends, her teeth crunching on it before she spit it out. “But then he killed himself. To this day I don’t know if the two are related, this propensity for pain, his depression.” She dove back under, swam away from Odilie, her hair like a shimmer of a shark in the newly placid waves.

Peri had to leave for a few days, go back to the city. Doctors’ appointments, a meeting with her agent about a campaign he was angling to land. She hadn’t been working much recently, she’d confided to Odilie, just the occasional gig. She was getting too old. “Don’t miss me too much,” Peri called as she reversed out of the parking lot of Odilie’s apartment building.

Take me with you, Odilie wanted to call back. She wanted to throw herself in front of the sports car, let it mow her down. She would welcome the crunch of bone, her innards splattered on the asphalt, if it meant she wouldn’t have to go back to a Peri-free life.

Those days were bleak, Odilie sequestered in her bedroom, a lone plume of cigarette smoke dancing along with the ceiling fan. She didn’t know what to do with herself, what her life had been like prior to Peri. What had she done to pass the time? Work, sleep, eat? She barely did any of those now, anyway.

Without Peri, she had the glint of an idea that she didn’t exist at all.

At work, there were always cursory greetings and chitchat, but she could be anyone, a faceless person, a stock image of a human. She felt herself taking up less space, too, her body more air than flesh, newly formed gaps and voids that hadn’t existed before.