He sat on a meditation bolster on the floor while I sprawled on the futon. And I began to try to fit the basic story of who Anita was to me into twenty or thirty minutes. There were some elisions and omissions, and I felt, as I spoke, like one of those accordion files we used to use in debate; stretched out they held hundreds of pages, but pressed into a purple Rubbermaid tub they became meek and discreet.

“Is it just sex now?” Chidi asked.

And that was when I knew I had to go back, to fill in what I had left out. The magic, and all we’d broken. Was it just sex? It had never been just anything.

“Well,” I said, “there’s a lot more.”

“You know how little you tell me about yourself, Neil?”

I shook my head.

“I’ve been wondering when you’d actually decide I deserved to know things about you. I’ve never understood privacy.” He kicked his legs up and began to do bicycle crunches, saying the next part through gritted teeth. “It’s a social world for a reason.”

“Chidi,” I interrupted, in part to get him to stop before he began to tell me about Twitter’s crucial import to humanity, but in part because he was right, because now that Anita was around again, I’d seen that he was right—the past was lighter when I wasn’t the only one shouldering it. “If you’re free now…”

It was to Chidi’s great credit as a friend and a general believer in the improbable that as I talked on for nearly another hour, describing the Lemonade Period, he asked only a few clarifying questions. I explained things like the properties of the gold, and the matter of Shruti.

“I feel like I… did it,” I admitted. It was the first time I had ever said it this way, with the neatness I’d begrudged Anita. I waited to see how it felt on my tongue. The short sentence, with no ambiguity, no spirit to it. “I did it.”

“You probably did.” He had switched from crunches to pushups on the hardwood while I talked, but he halted when it became clear the story was darkening. He now lay on his belly. “Maybe it was like a firing squad, though, man. A bunch of people’s guns pointed at her. Yours, too. You all pulled triggers. But you can’t be certain which bullet was responsible.”