Black Gloom slowly crushed her from crown to toe and she wondered how it was possible that she could be simultaneously sitting and flattened on the car mats.

Then she felt them all mixing together. Anchor and Blaze and Black Gloom, all at once, like a maelstrom—heavy, feverish, thick—churning under her skin. She couldn’t hold them. She wanted them out.

She lit a cigarette, sucked in a long drag, and butted it out on her palm, pressing its molten tip into the place along her lifeline where everything had gone wrong. A yowl spurted up her throat like bile, sharp and scathing as her wound, but she stoppered it in her throat, where it shook. Guilty people didn’t deserve to scream. They hadn’t earned the right.

With a pulsing stare, she focused on the pain—hot, deep, sharp. That pain she could manage. That pain she knew she deserved.

Then she gagged the yowling welt with tissues and climbed out of the car. Hiked up to the crowded lookout point. Slipped into an opening along the curved stone wall and let the panoramic view calm her breath. To the right were the rolling hills of the Eardley Escarpment, which from a distance, resembled sleeping Vishnu covered in mosses. She admired the pines and cedars, as verdant as coriander chutney, and leafy trees, vibrant with shades of turmeric and saffron and paprika. Below, a steep drop gave way to farmland that marked the landscape like earth-toned Hippie patchwork cloth. Straight ahead in the distance, the Ottawa River trenched through the land, gleaming.

And above, the soaring hawks, like kites, only freer because they had no cords to bind them to the ground.

“That’s why you loved them,” she said to Sunil. He envied them. Maybe he even wanted to be one of them.

A dark-haired woman with a green Tilley hat beside her said, “Pardonnez-moi?”

Kavita glanced at her and left.

On Halloween, she kept the lights off, and paused her hunger strike for the evening, telling herself that she was eating the candies for Sunil. He always loved Halloween candies, especially mini chocolate bars. She sat outside his bedroom in the dark with a bag of them and ate her way through it until all that was left was a mess of wrappers littered around her like decaying leaves. While she gorged, they reminisced.