I can’t untangle the reasoning, how I went so suddenly from cowering at a card postmarked Novi, to trying to know her, to understand her in all of her iterations, for the past decade. It’s like what Quinn told me opened a well in me, a need to comprehend. Before, I had simply accepted the fact that this woman’s life, and death, were attached to me for the rest of my life, like a necrotic appendage.

But somehow, humanizing her has paradoxically made me feel better. Like I’m bringing her alive again with a few clicks. And that’s just it. At least where I’m at in her timeline now, she is only showing what she wants others to see. There is no sense of invasion, no feelings of excavating a corpse. All I have encountered is an average girl, with a somewhat boring life, who somehow made her way into the upper echelons of New York, into Tom Newburn’s arms.

I roll over, close my eyes and hope that she doesn’t show up in my dreams.

9

One year ago

I still didn’t text him after he sent me the invitation to the exhibit. I wanted to wait, to push him, make him salivate a little so that when I did return his message agreeing to go, he’d remember how much he wanted me. I stayed late at the office that night. Huda and I ordered food from Thai Villa, getting pad Thai sauce all over our desks and keyboards. Neither of us were clean eaters, ever.

I liked those nights when it was just Huda and me. It reminded me of the early days, the scrappy intimacy we shared, working out of her leased walk-up in Williamsburg before she moved to Manhattan and got a real office. Huda was married, but you wouldn’t know it. Her husband was away half the year, working as a travel journalist, and when he did come home, he was still a fairly mysterious figure. Always in Huda’s background, shy and reticent around her friends and colleagues. They’d married when they were very young, straight out of college, but had known each other far longer, having grown up in the same Greek Orthodox community. Huda would say that she felt like she’d been married to him for her whole lifetime, that the months they spent apart barely registered.

But like Quinn, she was always keen to know about my dating life, so after we finished our work and made some gin and tonics using the communal ice machine, she made me get her up to speed. I’d told her I’d had a date that week.