Up in the guest room I sat on the bed and tried to comprehend what he’d told me. There was something unassimilable about it. It was at once too large and too remote to take in. Julia’s face appeared in my mind, obstinately alive—staring at me again in the stark light of her living room. Again I had the feeling of having missed something. What, though? It wasn’t as if I’d failed to notice she was unhappy. I didn’t think I’d glossed over any of my own stumbles or gaffes either. And yet I couldn’t connect anything I’d observed to this staggering piece of intelligence. The violence of the act seemed a deliberate challenge, daring one to imagine for oneself a state of rage or despair of an intensity requiring nothing less than the impact of a hurtling train against one’s frail body, to alleviate it. With an unpleasant inward jolt, as if something had been knocked loose inside me, I found myself remembering that in the notes for my abandoned literary project, I’d considered a possible suicide attempt for Julia. Not a serious one—in fact a decidedly frivolous one, involving a dozen aspirins and a cunning plan concocted by her to make sure she was rescued. The idea had been to place it directly after the episode (drawn from life) where she was jilted by her American fiancé, as a means of enhancing the quality of melodramatic self-absorption I’d allotted to her character. It disturbed me to recall it. Even without the brutal facts of this latest development to set it off, it seemed a strange thing to have invented. I wasn’t so superstitious as to regard it as some kind of illicit magical tampering in her fate (it wasn’t what had happened, after all), but precisely in its differences from the reality it otherwise so closely resembled, it seemed to confront me with some profound failure to comprehend her true character. I stood up, acutely restless—took out my phone to tell Caitlin the news, changed my mind, sat back down on the bed, and sprang up again, feeling suddenly cornered, and hurried back down the stairs.