And then I stopped. I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to know.

I sank to the floor, my back against the wall. I strained my ears, but I could hear nothing behind the door. That didn’t mean anything, did it? He could still be there, reading, writing—or he could not be there at all. What if I had imagined everything? What was wrong with me? Was there any chance Freud was real? I wanted desperately for him to be—and did this mean I was sick, or did it simply mean that I could give myself what I needed? If you eat me up, there will be nothing left. And yet hadn’t I eaten him up—wasn’t he, at this very moment, inside me? I closed my eyes. I expected to feel extraordinarily alone, but instead I felt the least alone I had ever known.

By the time I got up to make my way home, night had fallen. Ed was still at the bar. His eyes flicked up at me, and a strange look passed over his face. What is wrong with me? At once I felt repulsed by him, by his shtick and everything about him, and I was shocked I had ever responded to him with anything like pleasure.

“Good night,” I said, walking past him toward the door.

“Hey, you okay?” he called, but I ignored him.

I walked home, pulling my jacket tight around me. There was a missing dog sign plastered to a lamppost, four photos of a little Havanese named Henrietta: “She is an emotional/hearing service dog to a little nine-year-old girl…Not just a dog, she’s family…a loving home with a backyard she loves to run around in…Please, if you see her…please…“

I shoved my hands into my pockets. There was the napkin. I couldn’t look at it. What if it said nothing, what if it was just an empty scrap? I rubbed it hard between my fingers, then closed my fist around it, pressing it into my palm.

The street looked desolate. I dreaded seeing Jojo. I remembered her sitting on the stairs, her phone in her hand. She’d brought up Sam and had held out her arm, which, at the party, I’d squeezed in rage. I tried my best to recall how our conversation had ended; had she said something about moving out? Or had I? I had run outside and vomited over the railing, I recalled in a blurry snapshot, and then I had said something that had made her cringe.