My blood resumes circulation. My pulse quickens. Warmth returns to my hands and feet. I’ve lost touch with the rest of my bodily functions, but I go to the bathroom anyway just to look in the mirror to see for myself that I’m not having a stroke—that a brain hemorrhage isn’t triggering hallucinations. Gripping the sink, I lean into my reflection and stare myself down, flexing and stretching features, hunting for signs of palsy, but it’s just my face staring back. It’s just my naked body and salt-and-pepper chest hair, my ashen skin, so I guess I woke up on the wrong side of the looking glass after all. I count back from fifty and get all the way to twelve before the anxiety lifts. Settling into my body, I piss and leave the seat up and make the decision to say, “Like a baby,” when Elizabeth asks how I slept last night.

15.

My head is a hurricane. I sit in my office chair until the sun comes up, trying to reverse engineer a misunderstanding—a chance encounter on the way to the linen closet, an urgent message that couldn’t wait until morning—but I hear a stampede and can’t fool myself, and it doesn’t matter if the hoofbeats belong to horses or zebras or barefoot liars, or whether the violation was born of insecurity or attraction or boredom or spite. Reasons mean little to the creature being trampled underfoot.

This time, I submit to fury. It envelops but does not overpower me; on the contrary, it empowers me. I see red, yes, but I see so clearly now. Elizabeth’s betrayal is not born of lust, or a mockery of love, but of anger. It is an act of aggression directed toward me. Nick’s body is her weapon in the flesh.

Vanessa called this sort of thing self-sabotage: the methodical orchestration of an illusion of control. Tactical self-destruction eliminates the risk of being destroyed by outside forces, and the self-saboteur walks away believing she chose the wreckage. If a wife, for example, were to feel overshadowed by her husband, such that she resents him, but fears losing him, too, she might engage in behaviors that let her believe she broke the marriage, not the other way around. Her desperation might be a challenge to the husband’s honor, a test of his allegiance to his vows.

Elizabeth is daring me to fight for her—handing me her dirty blade with two sharp edges—to prove that my heart is not a pacifist. An irrational man might beat Nick with a titanium driver, break his limbs, throw him in the pool and watch him drown—which is to say, this man might seek acute relief by inflicting acute pain. I am a rational man, capable of seeking sustained relief by inflicting prolonged pain.