Why, she wondered, was she doing this? Did she think a series of shocks would somehow bring her back to life? She envisioned herself as a golem; it was easy. She might be disguised as a well-maintained formerly creative person who had a taste for fine textiles and cocktails and expensive organic hair dye, but she was actually a lifeless block of clay, with stones for eyes and a big gaping hole for a mouth. It was as if she’d just discovered a new rift and it was expanding by the second. What would you do if you found a hole in yourself? You’d fill it. You would stuff it up with whatever crude materials you happened to have on hand.

Even if it made no sense?

Her heart and pulse were going off now—like at the park at dusk two nights ago, like her phone ringing with a number she didn’t recognize.

Even if it made no sense.

“You’re hiding?” He folded the blanket. She thought of soldiers folding the flag. Why was precision so moving?

She nodded, her heart speeding. A man around Sarah’s age, new to the support group, had an identical-twin brother who had recently died. What the twin had: a history littered with dirty needles, blood poisoning, heart problems, and a pacemaker that had clocked the rhythms of his heart leading straight up to his death. Those numbers had spiked outrageously high in several bursts in a perfect mathematical illustration of the body’s absorption of crack or cocaine. The man told the story week after week. He repeated the numbers, how high, how low. He wondered whether it was crack or cocaine he’d taken that final time, then wondered why he wondered when it didn’t matter, nothing did.

“You’re hiding,” he repeated. “Dressed like that.”

She nodded.

“Who’re you hiding from?”

“My husband.”

“Your husband?”

She continued to nod.

She could feel his eyes all over her skin, looking for bruises and finding them. The one on her thigh was purple today, big as a newborn’s head. The cut on the bridge of her nose had started to heal, its blood beginning to dry and scab, which made it look worse.

He leaned against a tree and looked at her.

Her body was, she thought, plain. Not homely plain, more like … stark. She’d been called graceful, but graceful implied willowy, and that wasn’t her. You have the type of look men freakin’ love, her friend Andrea’s mother had told her during their senior year of high school. And when she responded, What do you mean? she’d been told, You look your best when you come out of the shower—you’re naturally pretty. But, honey, Andrea’s mother had said (kind of cruelly, Sarah realized in retrospect), the flip side of your kind of pretty? There’s no surprise to symmetry. You always look the same.