We exchanged minor pleasantries. At the door, purchases in hand, she turned back to me, smiled, and said, “Maybe someday I can join you and Duncan for lunch with Bonmot.”

For lunch. Under the willow trees. Just the four of us. How comfortable. How perfect. We would eat our sandwiches in the glare of the summer sun and talk of flesh necklaces and how they form and do not form in this forlorn city by the River Moth. Just now, even in remembering this suggestion, I feel that I am drowning.

A blackness grew inside of me, or the fungus overcame me, or any of a number of conditions or situations that you may, reading this, imagine for yourselves, and I said:

“I wonder. What route will Duncan take tonight? The Path of Remembering You or the Path of Forgetting You.”

The painting of the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office actually looked quite striking in the light that pierced the windows and gave my humble gallery a golden hue. The details of that painting became etched in my memory as I stared at it until I could no longer feel the reproach of her gaze and I knew she had gone.

My gallery was empty again. I was alone again. And that was as it should be.

Although I saw Mary on Duncan’s arm a dozen times after that, the next time I spoke to her directly was at the party where she stood waiting for me at the foot of the staircase, the dagger of her comment about Duncan held ready.

Ironic, really. I have reached out across time and space to construct a mosaic of her in a harsh light, only to find that now, when she shares a room with me, that light fails and finds her nearly … harmless.

Perhaps I have never really understood Sabon. Perhaps she remains the type of cipher who seems more remote the more words I devote to her. Fading into the ink, untouchable.

The fungus in this place has eaten into the typewriter ribbon. I’m typing in sticky green ink now, each word a mossy spackle against the keys. If I could turn off the light, no doubt my sentences would read themselves back to me in a phosphorescent fury—the indignation of creatures uncovered from beneath a rock. (Equipment failures should never be part of your narrative. That’s the first lesson Cadimon Signal ever taught me.) My ink has defected to the cause of the gray caps; not so my blood.

I have made Mary Sabon, deservedly so, as much of a villain in this afterword as the gray caps, and yet I could as easily have offered her an escape—even a fragile excuse could have absolved her for the way my heart feels right now. If only she had offered up something of herself. But she never has: you could pore over her books for a hundred years and never find anything personal. Whether Duncan had a better idea of her true nature is debatable. It is debatable that Sabon knew her own heart. (No—she knew. She knew who she was more perfectly than anyone I have ever met. I think that is why I loved her, and why she did what she did.)