He kept quiet, and she had no interest in talking—not about why she’d smiled that terrible smile and publicly questioned whether their separation had been a good idea, and certainly not why she’d told Kiki such a ridiculous and important lie. Matthew stretched out in bed, under several thin blankets, and either fell asleep or pretended to. She used to sometimes resent that he’d drop off so quickly at night, but these days she could barely remember that petty impulse. She was genuinely happy for him if he could get a good rest and had grown protective of his sleep. Because she couldn’t. The insomnia had improved in the past several months, but the mugging might have cemented her struggle. Her first bout had been in college, but after graduation, while living in downtown Manhattan—the best place to be an insomniac—she stopped worrying so much about it. Because after a few weeks of writing in the same restaurant in the middle of the night, she realized she enjoyed being awake and productive during those hours, and this recognition allowed her to plan a life for herself. Now, when she thought about her youth—her brief true youth—she thought of diligence, rice pudding, blue pen on colored index cards. She imagined bright lights in a bustling restaurant from midnight to 4:00 a.m. Being surrounded by some people eating breakfast, some lunch, and some dinner simultaneously and how this disorganization of people’s internal clocks filled her with a sense of tremendous freedom.

The floorboards creaked as she made her way to the bathroom in the hallway, which was pink tiled and too bright, and she kept her eyes down, avoiding the mirror as she washed her hands. When she went to dry them, her thumb brushed against something large and caught in the hanging white towel. The something fluttered so wildly she’d thought it was a bird or a bat, but she swallowed her shriek as she realized it was the biggest moth she’d ever seen, glistening black and fiercely batting the air while going nowhere. Wings beating, light shining, heart pounding—she fell back into the hallway and raced down the stairs.

In the living room, Kiki had burrowed herself under the blanket, and her sleeping mass formed a sculpture moving ever so slightly with breath. One large window revealed only darkness, the outdoor string of lights was switched off, and it was as if Sarah were waiting for the neighbor to flash his (probably drunken) signals again. Or she was waiting for someone to thread the reel, to project images of daytime, any day would do. Or maybe she was waiting for the day to begin. The screening would skip back several hours or days or even years, or all the way back to the first night in the garden with Kiki and Arman, with Leda’s toys underfoot.

She sat down next to Kiki.