“What’s happened? Nothing’s happened! We danced together at a club, so what? We did nothing wrong.” She pulled her hands from his and stood up quickly, accidentally spilling her hot chocolate. “Alexia, if you care about me at all you’ll forget about this whole night.” Anna started to walk off, but before she got to the end of the car, she stopped and turned around to face him. “I’m sorry I didn’t say good-bye earlier. I couldn’t bring myself to do it, because it meant our time together was over and I wasn’t ready for it to be.” She stood there staring at him staring at her and forced herself to continue. “But it’s over now.”

And with that she turned away from him and walked to the next train car. Count Vronsky sat very still, the only sound the dripping of her spilled hot chocolate, the only proof she had been there at all.

XXVI

Dustin awoke in the Bronx on a green pleather love seat in his brother Nicholas’s tiny room in the Meyerson Halfway House above the taco shop before 6 A.M. on Sunday morning. The couch smelled of cigarette smoke mixed with sour mustard plus the collective stench of all the others who had crashed there before him. Three slashes of morning light shone through the broken plastic venetian blinds of an otherwise dark room. Dustin sat up slowly because he could hear Nicholas’s raspy breathing.

When Dustin arrived the night before, he found his brother the sole employee of a tiny storefront called Taco Taco! When he entered the front door of the restaurant, if you could even call the dingy ten-by-ten room a restaurant, it was empty. The whole thing consisted of an orange counter and three sets of tables and chairs in varying degrees of disrepair. He checked his phone again, even though he knew he was in the right place. Dustin took a seat and his brother appeared moments later, smelling like cigarettes.

“Yo, what up?” Nicholas said as if Dustin weren’t his younger brother by three years. “Ya hungry?” Dustin’s stomach rumbled in the affirmative before he could open his mouth to speak. He nodded an emphatic yes.

“You still eatin’ meat, right? You didn’t go all hipster vegan on me, didja?” Nicholas chuckled glumly.

Dustin found his words. “Not me. I’ll always be a carnivore.” He added a few half-hearted wild boar–like snorts for a sound effect, but lost steam midway through the bit.