I started staying away from home. I started seeing other women. You could say Helen and I drifted apart. Like two sailors shipwrecked on ice floes. I could see her floating away into the Arctic night. Still giving me those reproachful looks. I was getting hell for something I hadn’t done. And one day I woke up and I thought I might as well get hell for something I had done.

I got up one morning, I put a piece of paper into the typewriter and I started writing. I changed the names to protect the record, and I altered a couple of facts, and I wrote it. God forgive me, I wrote her story, and I called it All My Colors, and I sent it to my publisher, and he loved it.

I wish now I’d never done it, but what good is that? I wish now I was living in that apartment still, with no money and no food, with the bones of our love to gnaw on. I wish she was still here.

The day I came back from New York, the day I signed the contract, was also the day it happened. I came in and there she was, in the bedroom. She was packing. She didn’t have to tell me why.

She picked up her case—it was the same cardboard valise she’d moved in with—and she walked out onto the landing. I stood in her way.

“Please move,” she said, not even looking at me.

“We need to talk,” I said. “You owe me that.”

“We talked,” she said. “You made a promise and you broke it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“I found your manuscript,” she said, and even though I had been expecting this moment for weeks, months even, a chill ran through me like a rod of ice.

She looked me square in the eye. “I knew this would happen,” she said.

“You made it happen,” I said.

“I did nothing!” Helen shouted. “It was you!”

She shoved me in the chest with the case, and I staggered backward. I grabbed her, without thinking.

“Get away from me!” she shouted, and shoved me again.

This time I can’t say I did what I did without thinking. I grabbed her hard. I was so angry. All I’d done or tried to do for her, and all she’d done was drive me away.

“Fuck you!” I said.

The last words I ever said to her. Fuck you.

She took a step toward me and I kicked her feet out from under her. I didn’t mean to do it—did I?—but I did. Helen went backward down the stairs, hit the banister, flipped into a forward roll and crumpled at the foot of the stairs.

I ran down after her. She lay there at a crazy angle. Her neck was broken. But she was still looking at me.