I start. Take a sip of my drink. I can’t taste the vodka at all, but I can feel its warmth in the very center of my belly. The words, they’re wobbly in my mouth before I speak. Because I’m not sure what she wants to hear. No one has asked me this; no one except that macho detective I was forced to speak to, with the overgrown nose hairs. Who was put off by the way I enunciated my words, the posture with which I held myself as I answered his questions. I could tell by the way he spoke down to me, even as he was asking me about my potential part in a homicide. A suicide.

He had slipped me his number to call, if I could think of anything else. But he had also scrawled his personal one, in spidery black lettering. I wonder, when I didn’t call, if he was one of the men who began 4chan threads in my name, dedicated hours to hurling as many insults about my appearance as possible.

I blink back to the present, Page’s brown eyes gazing at me under her feathery false lashes. “He was rich. Generous, I guess. Sorry, that sounds bad coming from me.” I close my eyes for a moment. “He was kind of a cardstock of a man, if I’m going to be completely honest. He went through all the motions, but I couldn’t get a read on him at all. At the time I don’t think I knew that. He...he played me. I was attracted to this kind of fumbling vulnerability he showed to me, handsome but hapless. The more time moves on, the more I realize that that was bait, to reel me in.” I’m about to say the last part. And we all know what happened when I wriggled away. But I don’t. We all know much too well.

Page’s eyes shift to the sidewalk, watching the passersby with their dogs and children. I hadn’t been aware of the noise at all, but now that I am it’s jarring. The undulations of all those voices, the tires reverberating off the asphalt as the cars whoosh by. It all suddenly seems so overwhelming to me.