“I just—” Cora threads her fingers together over her stomach, fidgeting. Esther feels shitty for making her nervous. “Does it really matter what she—whether she was gay or not, or whatever she thought about queer people? You’re still gay; those books still meant a lot to you. Is reading some homophobic shit she wrote going to do anything other than make you feel worse?”

Esther blanches, though she knows Cora is trying to be kind, is partly embarrassed by that kindness. “I know that. That’s not why this matters to me.” She sighs, rubs at her forehead, hands still cold enough from their snowy walk here that her own touch feels alien. “I wish I knew how to explain it.” Though some childish part does not think she should have to, is bitterly disappointed that just handing over Anais’s words was not explanation enough.

“That’s okay. I’m not, like—I get that it’s important to you.” Cora shakes her head, not in denial but as if she is trying to loosen the right language from its crannies in her mind. “That’s enough for me. I just—I’m wondering if the best outcome here might be not knowing?”

Esther tries to give Cora credit by considering this, but she is already positive of her answer. “No.” She goes over to the bed and puts her chin on Cora’s shoulder, tries to reassure them both with a little body heat. “I don’t ever want to not know something about her.”

The only way to really love someone is to know them. Even more so, Esther thinks, that is what love can be broken down to. That is what intimacy is. With enough love you could conjure someone perfectly in a room they are not in.

* * *

Later, in bed and not asleep next to Cora, whose breathing against Esther’s collarbone still sounds awake, Esther says, “It’s just weird that she has a kid who’s still alive.”

Cora sighs and kisses the skin under Esther’s earlobe.

“I mean”—Esther rolls over onto her back, staying in Cora’s arms—“it’s weird to me that there’s this person still out there who knew her so well . . . who saw her every day of her life, for this huge part of her life.” Gertrude probably never misremembers what her mother looks like.

“Yeah.” Cora noses at the part of Esther’s scalp where she’s shaved close. “I love how your hair feels here.”

“Thanks. You should read Julia Kristeva.”

Cora snorts. “It’s almost one.”

“She’s a literary theorist. She wrote this essay about abjection.”

“What about abjection?”

When Esther lies in bed next to Cora, she feels too big, like she has swollen to take up more room than she’s owed. She imagines that her flesh gives too softly under Cora’s sharp weight, like the skin of a rotting fruit. She doesn’t like the sound of Cora tolerating her, though maybe she shouldn’t mind this time, because she doesn’t remember enough of the Queer Theory course she read Kristeva in to answer many follow-up questions. Just this one concept, which stuck in her mind. “It’s the idea that sometimes, when we reject someone or something—violently, that is—it’s because we see ourselves in it.”