—and am reminded of why his poems could make me queasy, too.

I was Stuart’s muse. He loved to remind me of this fact, frequently, ostensibly to flatter me, but I’m not sure he knew much about muses, those goddess-nymphs, violently talented daughters of a Titaness who never forgets. Maybe if Stuart had consulted me before picking me apart on a cellular level—dramatizing my embryonic angst in iambic pentameter, as if he knew, as if he’d been there, as if—I’d have appreciated his intentions a little more. But no, he’d never risk not seeing me as a love-starved parasite, incomplete from conception to grad school, only made whole, at last, through him. And he wondered why I held myself back. He accused me of trying to be mysterious, but I was never posturing. I was just protecting what he refused to see: that I was secretly whole the whole time.

Stuart didn’t know why I went up to the Cloisters to circle the quince trees and sit on cold stone, that I’d pass those hours talking to Shae, telling her everything I couldn’t or wouldn’t talk about at home. Expanding. Sometimes I’d commune with her at Riverside Park, or the Botanical Gardens, or when I was feeling particularly compressed and in dire need of space, down in Battery Park. Or, later, the High Line. Stuart didn’t know the things I told Shae in my head. He never saw how complete I was, or how straight my thoughts were. After he found out about Robert, he kept saying, You aren’t thinking straight, and, This isn’t the Elizabeth I know, and I’d reply, That’s just the trouble, isn’t it?