She’s still looking at the painting when she says: After you left, Chris asked me if perhaps I thought I could save you, if that had been the appeal. But I never saw you as someone who needed saving. I saw you as someone who needed to be understood.

She goes back to the bed, picks up the pad, and studies what she’s drawn for forty-seven seconds. Then she says: You know what I missed after you left? I missed your forearms. (She laughs again.) I missed the way we would curl up on the couch at night, drink a little wine, and play each other songs on my computer, and you’d let me trace constellations in the freckles on your forearms. Remember the night I drew them with a Sharpie? You had Lyra and Orion inked on your skin for days.

For a while after you left, I would go outside at night and look for Lyra and Orion in the sky, and if I couldn’t find them, I would tell myself it was because you were holding them ransom in the little connect-the-dots galaxy on your arm.

She uses her fingers to shade a bit and then resumes drawing.

I’m not going to lie. I’ve considered the possibility that I had been wrong about you. I’ve wondered if my intuition had been off. If my senses had completely failed me. (She purses her lips as if she’s still pondering the likelihood of this and then shakes her head.) Whenever I try to convince myself of that, one specific memory comes back to me. That time we went to Inverness for dinner. I was driving up Highway 1 and all of a sudden you started pointing to the left, out my window, saying, “Look over there. Do you see that? It’s a Swainson’s hawk. Up in that eucalyptus.” Then you went on about how rare they are in Marin and how they’re sometimes called grasshopper hawks because that’s their favorite food and blah blah blah; I can’t remember the rest. I hadn’t actually gotten a look at the bird, and when we got to the restaurant I asked you to pull up a photo on your phone so I could see what I’d missed. After some hemming and hawing you admitted that you’d made the whole thing up. (She imitates my voice by dropping hers an octave and mumbling.) “There was no hawk.” That’s what you said. I asked you why you’d lied, and you got all bashful and said there’d been a dead dog lying on the other side of the road, that it looked like it had been hit by a car. (Her eyes get teary and she looks up at the ceiling then back down into the camera.) You didn’t want me to see it. (She wipes her eyes, tilts her head to the side.) You knew it would hurt me and you didn’t want— (She exhales.) Ironic, I know.

Anyway.

As I was saying.

How do you let go of something that lives inside of you?