I tried the doorknob, thinking about the time she’d walked in on me on her birthday, but it jiggled uselessly in my palm—locked.

“Lonnie? Do you want me to get James?”

I heard another muffled sob. “Or . . . Carlow?”

There was no answer, and I was getting worried. I ran down the hall to my room and grabbed the first thing I could think of—my pocketknife. Back at the bathroom I slid it against the doorjamb, right next to the knob, until I could feel the lock catch, then pushed the door open.

The room was dimly lit, faint evening light trickling in from a fogged glass window above the empty bathtub, where Lonnie sat. Everything around her was pristine but a little musty from lack of use. She was crying. She was a beautiful crier. Her face didn’t swell or redden, tears just spilled out of her green eyes, trickling down her cheeks, like a painting of the crying Virgin. The tub was huge. I climbed in next to her, careful not to slip on the porcelain in my heels. My dress bloomed across her lap. Our hips touched each other, touched porcelain; we were scooped against each other.

She told me she was having trouble being alone in a room. She had cut bangs in her hair, the stray tendrils in the sink. She kept touching them, brushing them one way and then the other, feeling the tips, just above her eyebrows. She looked different with bangs, younger somehow, a little more disheveled but in a way that appealed to me. It didn’t matter what she did; she was a beautiful woman.

She said she’s been dealing with a crushing nostalgia, running over these same places again and again, unable to accept the fact that the past is over. She said she felt like curling up in bed in the morning, in the dark, closing the blinds, longing for a dreamless sleep. A dark space of nothing. Because the something is sad, no matter what it is. It’s sad because it ends. Beauty is pain because it is not eternal.

She said, “This happens sometimes. Thank you for being here. I was fine. But my hand won’t stop hurting. Ever since I got drugged. I can’t sleep at night. And I guess there’s something about this place. When you’re separated from it you expect it to stay the same, but then you come back and it isn’t.”