I woke to Imlay’s face in mine. One vein at the side of his head bulged purple. He shook my shoulders in his hands, trying to rouse me. “What have you done, Mary? Wake up!” He slapped my face lightly, but my eyelids were too heavy to open; my head bobbed and fell onto his chest. He hoisted me up from the bed, but I was a rag doll in his arms. “Think of Fanny!” he said, gathering the back of my hair to hold my head up. “Your little girl!” I mumbled her name, or his name, but the sounds that came out of me weren’t sounds I knew, or a voice that was mine.

Imlay walked me around the room, strong hand at my waist, asking me questions, sometimes soft, sometimes shouting, making me answer. He must have found the empty bottle of laudanum by my bedside.

“How much did you take, Mary? What time did you take it?”

“Why are you here?” I kept asking him, even as my knees buckled under me. “Why did you come?”

“Your letter,” he said. “I read your letter.”

A doctor came, who gave me purges until I vomited everything in my body—what felt like everything I’d ever ingested, violently so. I was turned inside out, outside in, weak and listless. I was an empty vessel, without a will of my own, neither to live nor die. Either seemed too much effort.

It was then I caught sight of Marguerite at the door, wiping tears away, and Imlay, through the crack, trying to reassure her. She always spoke rapid French when she was upset or afraid. Imlay’s French was halting, but his voice calm. Then I saw Fanny, burying her face in her nursemaid’s skirts. Even then, too sweet for the world.

“Ça va aller,” Imlay said to Marguerite. “Tout ira bien.”

“Ça va aller,” she repeated, stroking Fanny’s hair. “Ça va aller.”

This was my coming back to consciousness.

The next few days I rested, woke, wept, refused to eat, stared out at the barren sky, and slept some more. Imlay often sat in a chair by my bedside, reading, sometimes aloud. But he felt more a guard than a guardian, I understood, lest I try again to end my life. Once a day Marguerite would bring Fanny in, little legs wrapped around her hip, but Fanny reached for me as soon as she saw me.

“Mama’s tired,” Marguerite told her. I caressed my little girl’s honey-gold hair. “Forgive me, darling Fannikin. We’ll play soon. Very soon.” Which was the most I could muster.

When I began to sit up in bed, then moved to the parlor, then took tea and toast, Imlay didn’t speak to me of love, but commerce.

“You can’t live on the sofa, Mary. There’s no future in it.”

“Is this a sofa?” I said. “I thought it was an abyss.”