When she heard the front door open and close again, she flopped over onto her stomach, punched her pillow, and collapsed, sobbing.

Wanting Harry was like a cancer. It seemed to begin in her pancreas, that day she spent in bed. In the days following, it crept steadily through her flesh: into her stomach, the corpuscles of her lungs, the hollows of her heart. Then it was in her blood, a sort of a tingling, until even her hands, feet, fingertips, and toes were numb. She couldn’t walk up stairs without tripping. Her vision went cloudy; her mouth was relentlessly dry. Even under all her quilts, she couldn’t get warm. She dreamed of JJ’s weight upon her, his warm breath on her neck, and then he turned to water and she was drowning. She woke up choking on tears.

JJ was a prickling sensation now, under her skin. She could smell him there, smoldering like the embers left after a forest fire has swept through. She hated him. He had taken what she had not meant him to have. But she couldn’t stop seeing the look on his face when he watched her leaving him. (And then she would think, Oh, God, what have I done?)

Sometimes she felt an inexplicable pang of wishing she might have somehow soothed him. But then she would get angry, and think, How dare he make me feel guilty for leaving him?

Because Harry was the one she wanted, the one whose absence was a void within her.

But when he stopped by again on Sunday, Anne still refused to see him. She couldn’t bear the thought of facing him, after what she had done.

But she constantly rehearsed an imagined encounter, as she pretended to study, to iron a skirt, to wash her hair. Not meaning to rehearse, but rehearsing, all the same. I’m sorry, Harry, but I did something that I couldn’t even dare to ask you to forgive me for.

Or: Something was done to me. Something happened. Something happened to me. That night.

Or: I believed that I loved you. I believe that I love you. I love you but how can it be true when the thing that happened to me is true?

And: I have been thinking constantly of who is to blame. Of what is true.

It was done to me but I did it. I did it but I love you. I couldn’t ask you to forgive me. I can’t.

I believed that I loved you, but how could I?

But never could she come to a satisfactory statement—she only arrived back where she had started, with more questions. And how could she meet Harry with only questions, when it was an answer that he was waiting for?