NINETEEN.

I’d been keeping a file of words. I’d started the list after October asked me what my favorite word was because I hadn’t had an answer for her then. But after that, whenever I came across a great one, I typed it up in my phone with the intention of sharing it with her at some point.

When we pulled into Casa Diez, October thanked me for doing such a great job on the project, but she said it in the aloof, I’m-pretending-you’ve-never-been-inside-of-me voice she’d been using with me all week. Then she got out of the car and headed toward her house carrying the little yellow flower arrangement Cal had sent her.

Rae followed October to the door, lugging a big garment bag with October’s dress. I offered to carry that for her, but she said she was fine, and I was left staring at my hands.

I waited for one of them to invite me in, but they bade me good night, and I went back to my apartment.

Just like that, the evening was over.

I felt too wired to go to bed but too drained to play guitar. I picked up the novel I was in the middle of reading and went to the couch, hoping the book might lull me to sleep.

The red taillights of Rae’s car flickered across my wall, and I sat up and watched her drive off. A moment later I saw October open the front door and let Diego outside. She stood on the porch under a soft amber light with her big cardigan still on, watching the dog. The night had turned chilly, and she held the sweater tightly across her chest.

Diego peed for nineteen seconds—I counted—and headed inside. October followed him, ruffling the scruff on his neck.

I moved from the couch to the bed and lay down, the unopened book now resting on my stomach. I stared at the dank wooden planks on the ceiling. All different shades and lengths, some had big knots in them, some didn’t, and the mismatched colors and sizes looked cheap and amateurish. This was a pet peeve of mine back when I built houses: when the wood was chosen and installed with no thought to art or design. I used to hand select the boards so that the ceiling looked meticulous and streamlined, which took a lot of time and drove Bob insane, but the clients appreciated it.

I replayed the night in my head, looking for an answer to the question that had been bothering me. Namely, the performance had gone better than I could have imagined, so why had it left me so unsettled?

I thought on it long and hard, and when that yielded no explanations, I changed tactics. I dug inside my body instead of inside my head. I tried to feel instead of think the answer.

And then it hit me. And it was so obvious. The whole thing—the resignation, the imprisonment, the rage, the grief—it was about me. No, not about me, it was me. Sure, October was expressing the themes of the show, and the visual portion of the piece convinced the viewers of that. But where her performance was coming from, the motivation, the depth and truth she was expressing, was calculatedly directed at me.