It’s just hard, sometimes, to be around Kristina. The two of them started life side by side with very similar family backgrounds, and they went through the same school system and moved in the same circle of friends. They went through the same traumatic experience in Venezuela. And yet Elisabeth spiraled downwards, all the way to rock bottom, and stayed there. Kristina found a way back up, and though Elisabeth is happy for her, and impressed with the success she’s made of her life, she can’t help but feel a little bitter and jealous. Kristina Moss, the mind doctor who was saved by the dysfunction of her own mind. If she could remember what really happened in Carúpano, she’d be on her fucking knees. Elisabeth remembers, and keeping it secret is like bleeding slowly to death from an invisible wound.

58

Supernova

Everything that has happened is because I love you and wanted to be like you and wanted to keep feeling what being near you made me feel. It doesn’t excuse what I’ve done. I’ve done bad things.

The image in my mind when I think of you and the way you live is this: a charmed, honed life, nothing left to chance. An inner life picked to pieces and analyzed inside out. Back to the house analogy – I want to take it even further. If you were a house, you’d be a sleek modern one with symmetrical lines and huge floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at an equally unblemished landscape. The house would have carefully arranged sections of expensive furniture – glass tables, flattering mirrors under warm lighting, soft leather chaise longues, never-sat-on white sofas. Other than that it would be empty. But under the house, where its foundations should sit on impermeable rock, is a vast, black space. The house sits precariously on a couple of wobbly stones, and far below the world you pretend to live in is another world. A dark one.

Now, we need to move forward. I’m so tired, so empty, wrung inside out. I can’t know what you will do with these words. Perhaps you’ve already abandoned them. In a way it wouldn’t surprise me if you had, I could imagine you might simply walk away and never look back if you suspected that something might compromise you in any way. It’s not a bad thing to be self-protective but I’m not going to lie, I hope you’re still reading. And listening carefully. We are going to be covering a lot of ground here, both past and present, and you will come to see that your life is enmeshed with mine in many more ways than one.

Onto the next thing. The big thing. Kristina, we need to talk about your husband.

59

Kristina