Sarah waffled on telling her about the conversation she’d had with David the day before about Half Blessed; it was an impulse to protect what remained of David’s dignity versus her innate desire to spill everything. She decided to keep it to herself for now—she wanted to connect the strands on her own, and this information could be saved for later, when it might be worth something. Either way, a decision had been made: because Claire had come to her with this new David information, not Beth, Claire thereby became by default its primary source, the line against which future data and opinions about David would need to be checked. Beth, through no fault of her own, by her silence thus became a secondary source for this issue, unlikely to be consulted. In any event, Sarah took her leave and an hour later sent the vaguest possible text to David. She had planned to let him make the next move, but got panicked by the lapse in technology, the way the message he’d sent melded instantly with the violent news, became part of the same set of data; she checked his profile throughout the day but the video didn’t disappear. She texted him: “Everything ok?” She knew she was setting a precedent by doing so, she was continuing a conversation she ought probably to end, but her curiosity—no, her empathy—got the better of her.

David received the message like he was receiving every scrap of communication transmitted to him that day—like a blow to his person out of nowhere, and for no discernible reason. It winded him. It drove home the idea that he had done something terribly wrong, he was acting irrationally, and his inability to see how or why was making it worse. He stewed in the speech he’d given to Sarah the day before, the images, and he felt drowned under the weight of them, as well as that of a broken promise, because our scheme hadn’t worked, not at all: he could tell in the moment she didn’t believe a word of it, and the longer he had talked, the more alone he felt, the bigger grew the disaster that was his person, the more he thought his brief relationship with Sarah was the one shot he’d had. He thought he knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t tell other people, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they knew regardless, they knew all of him, all his dirty secrets, and they were conspiring. He was unable to access his email on his phone, or any of his social media, and it all built up together into this impression that he’d been locked out of his own life, and behind the door, its previous inhabitants were scheming against him.