I talked to Yegina once or twice a week that summer, catching up on museum gossip and relating my mother’s perplexingly animated engagement with my hometown’s solid waste committee. We laughed a lot and kept things light. Still, it felt like someone was laying down more miles between us every time we spoke. When Yegina asked me one warm August day when I was returning, I said the same thing I’d always said: late September. But still I hadn’t bought a ticket. I didn’t name a date.

“Still Lives is closing September 15,” she informed me. “We had a big debate about extending the dates, because it’s still drawing a lot of visitors. But Janis wants us to move on. She says we’re not in the business of ‘titillating tourists.’”

I laughed at Yegina’s imitation of our museum leader’s deep, brusque voice, but it was hard to imagine our crew taking down the paintings of murdered women, hanging them on racks in our crowded storage room, shrouded by cloth. All those panicked, lovely, and shuttered expressions, all those Kims looking out from the horror of their deaths, soon to be locked away.

“I thought, maybe, Still Lives was one of the reasons you haven’t come back,” Yegina said tentatively. “It’s been hard for everyone at the museum. Every day the visitors come to see it, we have to keep reliving what happened. But you won’t have to, if you return after the fifteenth.”

“I sublet my place till New Year’s,” I admitted.

There was a pause as the news sank in.

“But your job,” Yegina said. “The designers are already falling apart. The museum can’t extend your leave until 2004.”

“I know they can’t.” I told her how happy the Ivy League couple seemed, how grateful, how eminently successful. He’d landed a position with Universal. She was applying for a PhD at UCLA. They were thrilled by my bungalow’s location and hoped to find a place exactly like it. Hint, hint.

“So you’re quitting the Rocque,” Yegina said.

“No. Not yet, anyway.”

“Please don’t tell me you’re abandoning your whole life here to make a couple of snobby strangers happy.”

“I’m not,” I said. “But I have to practice letting go for real. I have to try it out. So if I go back to California, it’s for the right reasons.”

It was hard to convince Yegina that a Hollywood bungalow rented below today’s market value wasn’t reason enough, but we ended up riffing happily together over the ridiculousness of California real estate. I was relieved that she finally knew the whole truth. She, too, seemed lightened by my honesty, though her voice hollowed when we said good-bye. So did mine.