“No, Anna,” Alexander said. “You don’t get to throw away our last three years like it was nothing. We had plans, a future together. Are you not going to give me the courtesy, the decency to talk this through? Help me understand what happened! You can’t possibly think you have a future with him! He’s a child, for fuck’s sake.”

Anna sat back down. The grief in his face pained her. He looked so helpless in the hospital bed, his leg broken, in a room surrounded by ugly vases and cheap baskets of wilting get-well flowers. Alexander’s last words really hit her hard, and his tone reminded her of her father and how he sometimes spoke to Steven when he was disappointed with him. She shut her eyes as the enormity of the situation pelted her like rain pouring down without warning. Her mother and father were going to find out what she had done. Alexander’s dad and stepmom would also be told. Anna had a great relationship with his parents, and his dad had always told her he loved her like a daughter. Their lives were totally intertwined, as close to marriage as two teenagers could get, really. She was a fool to have thought she could just tell him it was over and walk out the door like some stupid movie where the guy doesn’t get the girl and just accepts his fate.

“Okay, you’re right,” she conceded. “Why don’t you take a nap and I’ll come back tomorrow?”

“Don’t see him,” Alexander said, looking her straight in the eye. “Can you do that for me? Don’t see him or talk to him until we have time to talk tomorrow. You owe me that at least.”

Anna was not a liar, and in fact had taken great pains never to lie in the past few weeks, even if she had been vague and told half-truths about her plans and whereabouts. So when Anna told Alexander that she wouldn’t see or talk to Vronsky until after she and Alexander spoke in the morning, she meant it. They had spent three years together as boyfriend and girlfriend, and she did love him, or at least she had thought she did. Only now, after falling in love with Vronsky, did she understand the difference between being “in love with someone” and “loving someone.”

Anna kept her word to Alexander and didn’t answer Vronsky’s texts, nor did she answer the phone when he called her. She didn’t answer Beatrice’s calls or texts, either, not wanting to exploit the loophole of honesty and make her the go-between. Instead she just went to bed and slept longer and harder than she had in weeks.