She’d misplaced crucial words. She’d left her handbag behind, and the small electronic device with which (she knew! she felt this so strongly) she could have summoned her true husband, who would have annihilated this imposter. She’d lost the key to—something. What, she wasn’t sure. In a shadowy region of her brain, these crucial words resided, but she could not locate the region, and if she did, she could not have opened the door, which was locked, or its doorknob sabotaged so that it turned uselessly in the hand. Now she recalled that she’d been seeing signs in recent days, weeks: the faces that mirror your own face, familiar faces that behave in unfamiliar ways, faces whose expressions you must decipher in order to decipher your own condition—those faces that have been smiling, alert, admiring through your lifetime but have now (inexplicably) ceased to smile. When these faces betray alarm, dread, pity, you shrink from being seen by them and you no longer wish to see them.

She cried how she hated him!—why didn’t he let her die?

Pushed his hands away, screamed at him not to touch her even as he protested: “But I love you! My darling wife, please …”

Now he did advance upon her. Clumsy, weeping. As an older man might weep, unpracticed in tears. His arms in the woolen shirt around her, Abigail in the flannel nightgown smelling of her body. She was not without shame—shame would cling to her to the last.

Holding her tight. Holding her as a drowning man might hold another person, desperate that she not escape. Abigail could not breathe, this person was squeezing the breath from her. Arms against her sides, bound tight. As together they staggered toward the bed, fell heavily onto the bed. The physical reality of another’s body is always a shock—size, density, heat. His tears wetted her face. She had not the strength to break free. Until at last, too exhausted to resist, she lay beside her captor, weeping with him, in deference to him, her brain blank, annihilated. Her eyelids were too heavy to keep open and so what bliss to surrender to sleep; what bliss, the sweet, sickly, dazzling white smell of gardenias that pervaded the room entering her nostrils, flowing up into her brain like ether, precipitating the most delicious sleep in the arms of the stranger.

His arm over her, heavy, comforting.

“My darling wife! I will never abandon you.”

Something was pressing on her chest. An opened hand, a sweaty palm. Terror of suffocation.

Waking abruptly to glaring light. Was it another day, a morning, or was it the same day, interminable?—had she endured a night?

But sleep had bathed her raw, aching brain. She could think more clearly now.