I took a deep breath, tried to center myself and said, “Listen, this job is important to me, and I’m not here to mess up anyone’s life. What happened between me and October was a mistake. I get it. She gets it. It’s over.”

“Very happy to hear that,” Rae said.

She made like she was going to walk away, but then she stopped, looked at me, and when she spoke again it was as if she’d taken off a mask.

“You know, I went to art school for a while,” she told me. “I thought I wanted to be an artist, but I quickly realized that I didn’t like making art as much as I liked being around it. I dropped out. After that I couldn’t get a job in the art world to save my life. When I met October, I was working as a receptionist at a company that makes pasta sauce. I thought her work was special. I told her that if she ever had a place for me, to call. About a year later, she did.” Rae paused, seemed to waffle a little, as if perhaps she was revealing too much. “I appreciated that. I owe her a lot. All I’m doing here is looking out for her.”

“Maybe you underestimate her. Maybe she can look out for herself.”

“Maybe you don’t know her as well as you think you do, yeah? Maybe I’ve seen her get hurt. And maybe I know that when she gets hurt, she doesn’t get over it for a long time. Chris has his issues, I know. But he can’t hurt her. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad we had this talk.”

I nodded again, and she went shuffling back into the house.

The following night, October sent me a file to catalog for the 365 Selfies site. The subject line of the e-mail read: “Reverse Suicide Selfie.” It was a video of her walking out of the ocean, and it began with a shot of the waves. October was completely submerged under the water, so much so that I didn’t expect to see her. A second later she was there, heading toward the camera. I’m not even sure how she managed it, because she was wearing a long dress, similar in shape to the one she’d had on the night of the dinner party, but the one in the video was belted, and the belt had big leather pockets with fringe hanging down on each side.

The pockets were filled with rocks, and as October emerged from the water, she lifted the rocks from her pockets. One at a time she dropped the rocks into the sea and then, once she reached the beach, onto the sand.