“Now what you have to do is forget everything I’ve told you. Because this is the part that is not about any of that. I don’t mean for you to discard it, just let it slide off to a corner of your mind and hold it there for later. For you. Right now feature only this—a man who twenty-five years past harmed a woman and the woman did her best to harm him even worse but failed. See that man, not young anymore but still one with a hint, a faint stir of hope that the mess of his life could change someway. See him there, right out the front of this house sitting up on the front porch in a hot September afternoon, not so different from the one you walked in on. Except he’s out there like he does most every afternoon. Waiting. Because there has not been a day go by but what he thinks of her. Not a single solitary one. She, who could be dead for all he knows. Except she is not. He knows this. And it is not just daytimes. At least once a week he wakes from dreams of her, dreams where her skin and voice, where the touch of her is so vivid that waking he wants to hurt himself to get back there. To that dreamland. And he wonders how many of those dreams occur that he sleeps right through. On the one hand he likes to think it’s not many of them and on the other he likes to think that she flows through him all the time without stopping. Because he knows it is not his brain that labors over her, not his mind but his soul. His heart. Where each and every day he is disturbed by her. Where he has long since worn out all the could-have-beens. All the ways he could have been different. Acted otherwise. Where he has made some peace with himself and does not quite think she will have done the same but still knows it will be different if he should see her again. And you see, he expects this to happen. Except he has been expecting this for so long it is expectation he has become. The actual woman, she is a fragment. She is only a portion of all that waiting. She could be anywhere on the earth, doing anything. And so he sits right where he is, because it is the only way he can think that she might ever find him. Because, you see, he cannot find her. And that is not a question of knowing where she is or not.