“I could use one,” I said.

“She could use one,” Lonnie said, standing, pointing at James and then Carlow’s back.

“Should I not have encouraged her?” I asked, when she disappeared.

“It doesn’t matter,” James said. “There’s no stopping her anyway.”

She returned carrying two highball glasses, filled far too high with scotch or cognac, something brown and straight—one for me and a refill for her.

We clinked glasses. “Never let a lady drink alone,” she said. The alcohol smelled mossy and strange.

“I want to tell you,” she said, putting an arm around my shoulder, pulling me awkwardly down to the rug in front of the sofa where we sat side by side, “about my idea. My book idea. Because I’m going to write a new book. I’m going to scrap the old one. I wasted a lot of time upstate with those people. But I have a new idea, a better idea.”

“You were writing a book?” I said, the wrong thing to say. She frowned and reached out as if to hit my face, but only managed to graze my cheek with a couple limp fingers.

I tried again, “What is it?”

“I want to write the mystery we made up. The one named after Carlow’s photo. But I want the mystery never to be solved. Or for the woman to not actually exist.”

“How deconstructionist,” James said.

“Is it?” Lonnie said.

Though I actually felt like telling them both to shut up, that none of this mattered, I tried to cover up my anger and anxiety. Tried to act normal. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Words don’t signify what we think they do,” Lonnie said, still slurring. “We can only understand ‘now’ in relation to ‘then,’ so we can never really understand time. James doesn’t really get it.” She whacked him on the arm.

“You kids,” Carlow said, “you kids and your lack of guilt.”

Lonnie and I both whipped around. “What the hell are you talking about?” Lonnie said.

Carlow didn’t look up from his phone. “You can just sit around talking about the unknowable like fact. No God anymore. You lucky kids.”

I didn’t know where he got off.

“Bullshit,” Lonnie said, and I thought she was going to call him out on distracting from the conversation at hand, but instead she said, “I feel guilty all the time.”

“Can’t you just deconstruct your guilt?”

“You know I still believe in God.” It came out small from her mouth, a quiet little sting of a sentence. “I’m Catholic.” No one responded. Lonnie tilted her head back to down the rest of her drink, and went to get another.

It was at that point, when she returned, that Carlow started to record her, pointing his phone in her direction, holding it steady and not saying anything.