“But it is, Neil,” she said sadly. “It is way back in the past. That doesn’t make it any less horrible. But it’s there. It’s too late.”

The bartender was forming a kind of metronome, clinking liquor bottles against each other and stacking glasses. I turned to Anita and was surprised to find her unblinking eyes still on me. All her concentration seemed to be focused on convincing me—of something.

“You think about her a lot, don’t you?” Anita said more softly.

“Most days.” I drew on my beer glass with my pinky. “I’ve never told anyone.”

“Why not? I don’t mean about the lemonade. I mean about—her.”

“How could I have?” I’d considered making Shruti my great confession in college. I wanted to erupt with the unsayable story of her during beer-foamy make-outs. When a girl began to tell me about her trauma, which she had learned to wrap in the language of a white therapist, I considered hissing her name, Shruti, daring the girl to ask further. “There’s no language for what happened.”

“No language? Or language you don’t want to have to use?” The space behind my sternum burned. “Anyway,” she added, “aren’t you quite good with language?”

I had worried sometimes, with Wendi, with Arabella, that my capacity to feel immense emotions—not just grief or terror, but the kind of rich aches that remake you—had died with the end of the Lemonade Period. What they say about addicts: in the end, the brain is fried, and the daily dramas of life become doldrums. But sitting in the Sonora, with Anita’s gaze haloing me for the first time in years, a glimmer of all that returned, and it felt like grace.

“I am sorry,” she said. “For being cold to you for so long.”

“Cold? You ignored me. I had nobody—”

“I couldn’t have helped you. I needed space. And you’d made me feel so dirty, Neil. That night stuff happened with you and me? I could feel her in my bedroom with us as soon as I realized what you’d done. I swore I could just see her glaring at me. She liked you. That’s all I could think about, how much she’d liked you, and I just couldn’t look at you again.”

“Yeah,” I said. It was the first time I had ever been told by someone else what I had done. And I felt less shame than relief, for at least here was someone corroborating the lonely certitude I’d lived with for years; here was one of two other people alive who knew what I was. “I couldn’t look at me, either.”