Old Man spreads out the towel, takes out a couple bags of chips and offers her one. Gruyere, he tells her—it’s a new flavor! Soon clutches her head in her hands. Old Man doesn’t understand anything, she thinks, he doesn’t realize that it’s a matter of days, or hours, before they find her out, before another cop comes to her house and arrests her. The game is going to end, and Soon is afraid, and she’s in a hurry. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen, or how it’s going to happen, and she doesn’t know the steps she must take to bring it about.

But something has to happen, and it has to be now.

It’s easier to imagine confessing it later, telling a girlfriend, for example—even Marga—or a guy friend—even better, a guy friend—flaunting a tormented and decadent air, the aura of a bad girl, an abused girl, a girl who had a brush with danger and lived to tell about it. Old Man doesn’t notice the change in her, her sudden determination, which complicates things because she’ll have to start from scratch, without any help from him. Old Man, she says, but she doesn’t know how to go on. Old Man, she repeats, and she looks at him, begging for his cooperation, but he doesn’t understand. What’s wrong, Soon? You don’t want to try them?, he says, offering her the chips again. No, she says, and then, like a spark—and where does that intuition, that wisdom, come from?—I don’t feel good, it hurts here, in my leg. Your leg? Why does your leg hurt? Did you hit it, did you fall? Yes, I fell, and she moans, but her moan is singsong, unconvincing. Old Man gets up, comes closer, let me see, he says, just what she wanted to hear. Soon stands up too, but—unexpectedly—she’s overcome with shame, an intense modesty at the prospect of showing herself—of showing him even just a bit of her flesh—and she points over her tracksuit pants: here, it hurts here. But did you cut yourself, are you bleeding, is it a bruise? What is it, Soon? In an impulse, she pulls down her pants.

(And it’s no coincidence that the song of a starling scratches the silence created between the two of them. She recognizes it: a starling, she thinks. She’s well-trained now.)

Soon is in her underwear with her sweatpants around her knees. Old Man, more bewildered by her abruptness than by the sight of her naked thighs, takes a step back. I don’t see anything, he says, and then she pulls down her underpants. Do you see something now?, she screams.