“Lissa,” he says, holding out his hands in supplication.

“It wasn’t worth it,” she says again. “None of it.” And she gestures as she speaks, at herself, at him, at the sudden painful squalor of it all.

Hannah

SHE DREAMS OF VIOLENCE, OF LISSA’S FACE LACERATED WITH A thousand tiny cuts. Of holding Nathan’s severed head, his blood soaking her lap. Sometimes the violence is chasing her and she is running from it across a wide-open space. It is gaining on her and there is nowhere to hide—a dark presence, its long fingertips touch her neck.

At night, sleepless, she travels over the roofs to Lissa’s house, to where she lies in her guilty bed. How does she sleep? Does she sleep?

Finally, she sleeps herself, and when she wakes, when the world assembles itself in the dawn light, she understands it is a new world—the old one blasted to shards—and that this new world is a place that operates by different physics, different laws. She imagines them together, her husband and her friend—their hands, their lips, their naked flesh, the parts where their flesh has met. The secret, beloved places on his body that she had come to think she owned. How did he touch her? Was it animal and nothing more? Or was it, is it, more?

She may not ever know. And this fact—the knowledge of his subjectivity, these experiences of his to which she will never have access—feels more violent, somehow, than the betrayal itself. What she feels when she thinks of this is beyond pain; it is close to delirium—colors seem brighter, sounds louder. Many, many times she lifts her phone, or goes to her computer—to curse him, to accuse her—but each time she turns away, puts down the phone; what words could she find that would encompass this?

She avoids the park, no longer walks down through the market. She walks to the bus stop and then back, that is all. She makes sure there is little chance of seeing Lissa in the street. Still, she thinks she sees her often—a tall, fair frame ghosting at the edge of sight.

WINTER TURNS, BECOMES spring. It stays cold. She has annual vacation to use. Two weeks of it. She has no real idea of where to go.

She clicks through pictures of cottages, of white-sand Scottish beaches, of lochs that look deep enough to drown a city in. Of places where she knows no one, and people are few. She is hungry for something that she cannot quite name—some elemental nourishment, something wild. She wants to taste salt water. Be scoured. Feel wind and weather on her skin.

One day, riding the tube home from work, she sees a poster for Orkney. Sea and wide skies and wildlife. She goes home, and within minutes has booked planes, a hotel, and a car. She will go in March.