I drank the tea and M’s boss’s wife sighed and tapped some more at her phone. There, she said, looking up. Tickets are booked, she said. Darling, she said, to M’s boss, I’ll be gone for a week. I’ll miss you so much! And M’s boss smiled back at her and patted the baby and it was clear that of course they would miss her too and also that they would love her so much more when she got back. Maybe he said it, M’s boss, We’ll love you so much more when you get back, he might have said. Well maybe they would.

There’s always so much to do! she said and smiled and looked at me and what else could either of us have done with that. Yes, I said and crossed my legs the other way and smiled again and got up to look for E.

Finally I found her. She was in the hall bathroom, opening bottles of oil and soaps and pouring them down the sink. The room smelled so strongly of perfume that I took a step back then of course immediately ran inside and grabbed her arm.

What are you doing, I almost yelled, pulling her out of the bathroom. Too roughly, too roughly. I knew it was. I couldn’t bend well in the dress. I couldn’t grab her and run away like I should have in my stockinged feet that were already slipping. The floor seemed to have turned to ice underneath me, just like that.

She looked at me with her dark nothing eyes and all I could do was pull her out into the hall. My hands were shaking again and for a moment I wasn’t pulling her anymore but holding on. I left her in the hallway and ran into the bathroom and shut the door. I opened the faucet and let the water run. I rinsed out all the little bottles that E had left in the bottom of the sink. They looked maybe like scarabs, lying there, spent. I lined them up on the little wooden shelf by the sink where E had surely found them, but that wasn’t right. I turned the tap back on again, as high as it would go and I smashed the bottles one by one into the perfect porcelain finish of the sink. The bottles chipped the sink where they broke, throwing themselves against the finish like those pods of whales that kill themselves sometimes, hurling their great and perfect bodies up onto the beaches for nothing. Sometimes where they broke, the bottles, the two cut places touched each other for just a moment like veins, like anything at all that had been done could be undone, the doing of it. I crushed the bottles all back into sand and washed all the bits and pieces down the sink. I pulled all of the quilted tissues out of the tissue box and stuffed the toilet up with them. If anyone asked I would tell them E had done it.