Leora reached for her alarm clock, which she had turned around to keep herself from constantly looking at it. She had even switched her clocks around after her last sleepless night, packing up her blindingly bright digital one and instead displaying the little portable clock she used on business trips, whose hands she could barely make out in the dark unless she really tried. It didn’t help. The last time she had checked the clock, it had been half past three in the morning. Since then she had squeezed her eyes shut, then forced them open in the hope of exhausting herself, then pulled up the sheets, then pushed down the sheets, then attempted to make a mental list of all her elementary school teachers, then attempted to list all the roommates she had ever had in her life, starting with summer camp fifteen years earlier, then began panicking about work, where she had three interviews the next day which she would now have to conduct with less than five hours of sleep, then forced herself to pretend that her bed was a boat on the ocean, a boundless ocean with never-ending waves—and then she gave in and looked at the clock again. She was sure two hours had passed, at least. When she turned the clock around and saw that it was only a quarter to four, she felt her sanity slip away and, remembering that Lauren and Melanie were both out of town, started to wail.

She cried and cried, unable to stop herself and without even knowing why she was crying, except that suddenly everything seemed terrifying—the apartment, her bedroom, the darkness in the room, the stillness of the air, the bed, the half-shaded window that let in a square of light like the entrance to a tomb. She wailed into the darkness, louder and louder, until all the empty space in the room reverberated with her wailing, jolting the room with waves of sound. She sobbed and sobbed, wondering if anyone would hear her—and then she realized that she was hoping someone would. Still wailing, she blundered in the dark for the phone. As she picked up the receiver, the glowing numbers on the handset almost blinded her. She hung up. But a few moments later, her wailing had grown so loud that her throat had begun aching from her cries. The walls were painted with them. She released a few more wails, feeling like a wolf howling in the night, then picked up the phone again and dialed.

After two rings, she heard Jake’s voice, which sounded surprisingly alert. “Hello?” he asked with earnestness, as if he were genuinely curious as to who was on the other end of the line.

“Jake?” she asked, her voice still flying from the wailing.

“Leora?”

“Did I wake you up?” A stupid question to ask at four in the morning, Leora thought an instant later.