“Really?” Carla’s first thought was surprise that a girl went after him. Then she filled in the scene. Shane was her friend too, had been since high school. That party was packed with her friends from all different circles.

“I shoved her off me,” Dave said. “And ran.”

He bowed his head into his hands and cried. Carla stroked his back, running her fingers in long, easy patterns. Dave didn’t sound like a victim. Yeah, he was blacked out. But he’d probably been talking and awake and acting normal. They’d had whole conversations, whole subway rides, whole late-night trips to restaurants where he’d admitted afterward he was blacked out. Plus he’d fucked a girl with the door open. When she asked him more questions, the story got worse. The girl had cut her forehead when he pushed her off. And she was a younger cousin of Shane’s.

Carla kept her ambivalence to herself. She was there for Dave during those next hard days. She cooked macaroni for him and called in sick for him and ascertained that his showers incorporated soap. She listened to him discuss the incident, recounting how, when he’d gained consciousness, he’d expected Carla. How he’d thought he’d recognized Carla’s chubby cheeks and swinging ropes of hair.

For weeks Dave obsessed over the incident. He referenced it incessantly, especially whenever Carla had managed to forget. Then, one day, he returned to normal. He went back to work at the bar. He resumed drinking.

Carla snuck out to meet Shane at a diner, where she convinced him to convince the cousin not to present battery charges. The girl had needed minor plastic surgery.

“Dave’s pretty upset too,” she said, after Shane had railed at her for half an hour.

Shane screwed up his face. “Why?”

“He feels she took advantage of him.” Carla couldn’t say the word rape. Why couldn’t she say it? She believed Dave. He’d blacked out. He’d never cheat on her. She drew a fork over her pancake, tearing the surface. “He was blacked out. He didn’t consent.”

Shane laughed, the wet cushion of his tongue pumping. “Come on, Carla. Jesus.”

Her friends had talks with her, one by one, at brunches that were designed to look casual but took U-turns into seriousness, plus one formal intervention where they said Dave had cheated on her and she had to admit it. They said she was in denial. She could forgive him or not but she had to start with the facts. She solemnly agreed because, at the time, part of her had believed that version too.

In the years after the relationship dissolved, when she was out every night sleeping with strangers, up late on Craigslist and OkCupid considering the bleak fluorescent-lit selfies of men and women slumped alone on couches all over the city—even messaging one guy whose profile picture was his pay stub—she hoped for another intervention.

Carla reaches the edge of the fair. Wind wraps her from three directions through the openings between buildings. The sharp air carries with it every other day in Madison: the short light, black ice, and lack of privacy. The color of Madison is slate blue—frozen lakes, concrete wedges of government offices and English departments, the snow churned up with beet juice and gravel. She turns and heads back into the fray. For half a block she closes her eyes, kids buffeting her from all sides, the smell of hormone stew. On this skinny strip of land between two lakes she’s floating away from the rest of the country, alone.