At last I returned to college for the autumn term. By late September I realized I was going to have a baby. Well, of course I was! We must have fucked fifty times at least; I doubt there was a moment all that summer when my fresh young womb was not teeming with that man’s sperm. I wrote a letter to my lover and asked humbly what I should do, but he never replied. I thought it would be bad form to confront him face-to-face, so I went to Mother, who promptly took me to some doctor she knew of, who solved the problem. After the thing was done, she told me she hoped I’d learned my lesson, because she and my stepfather wanted no more to do with me, and that was when I started on the road with my camera, older but wiser, armed with a few new guiding principles.

First, no matter how much you’re tempted, do not have to do with married men.

Second, never allow a male member indoors unless it’s properly dressed.

Third, you may lease your body to whomever you fancy, and insist on your pleasure as a condition of same, but whatever you do, in whatever bed or sofa or sunlit meadow, for God’s sake keep your heart to yourself.

In time, I was to break all three of those rules, although not at the same time. We are only human, and our miseries take on infinite form.

Now, why have I told you this sordid, unhappy story, this stale tale already told a million times by a million other women, when I have not told another living soul? Because I think you should know that I am not so invincible, not so hard and so careless as I sometimes seem. I have been naïve. I have behaved stupidly, even culpably. I have sinned and repented, I have deceived others and been cruelly deceived myself. I have been wounded so deeply I wanted to die.

But I did not die. I am Perseverance, remember. I am Survival.

And I am not so callous that I don’t feel a bone-crushing remorse at the sight of that airplane wreckage and a shudder of fate repeating itself and finally a sense of loss that almost brings me to my knees, because in my grief and my outrage I’ve destroyed something important. I have caused this nightmare that is my own worst nightmare.

All these thoughts bear down on me in a series of instants, and in the next instant I leap forward to help with the water tank, because I don’t do so well with the blood, and anyway Olle seems to be performing every necessary thing.