We stayed on the second floor of the highest skyscraper in town. Abe explained his trouble with heights, which didn’t surprise me. It’s alright to be scared. I knew he believed it. We watched the city below our windows. It was too warm, strange for the season, as if something had gone wrong with the world or the sky. I thought, He’s thinking about her. I was thinking about her. I knelt on our balcony and kissed his ankles, the backs of his knees, the rise of his stomach. I wanted to swallow how he tasted. He is a good man, I thought. A good man.

Tilly was alright, back there. She had to be.

We ate dinner at a fancy restaurant. I picked at foie gras, spooned small bites of fig reduction. Abe wanted to know why we’d come all this way. I asked: Could he just trust me? I couldn’t tell him what she’d looked like, her naked body sweating in a dingy motel or rising from a cold bath—drunk beyond speech, beyond knowing me or even herself, those gin liters marking the map of her thirst, tepid water holding the wreck of her body. I wanted him to trust me.

We split a chocolate-kumquat tart and didn’t say a single word. This silence felt different than our silences had felt before. It was simply between us, inevitable, without a sense of possibility or liberation.

We slept on a strange plush bed. I missed the hard floor. I missed the chatter of lonely folks on the streets, whispering up through the windows. Here everything was beeping, ringing, shrilling with strangers’ cries of glory and surrender.

That night I dreamed about kicking my mother’s body with the toe of my boot. We were back in the desert. Dark lines of sunset streaked over the horizon like blood springing up, bright and sudden, to fill the line of a fresh cut. I smoothed back my mother’s hair, felt her scalp beneath a mess of blood-sodden strings. I kneaded her wounds and they softened beneath my fingertips like something I was sculpting from clay. “I’m making it better,” I told her. “In this place I can.”

Wounded women. Blood. My dreams turned me into such simple lines of meaning. Single sentences, punctuation. An exclamation point!

Abe woke me up in the middle of the night and whispered, “Did Tilly ever talk to you about getting hurt? I think there was a time she was beaten.”

“Go to sleep,” I said. “Nobody’s beating anyone.”

“I’m not talking about now,” he said. “I’m talking about then.”

His words were like insects under netting: Did Tilly ever…Was there a time? I think maybe there was a time. I couldn’t get back to sleep. I reached across the bed to touch his shoulder. “Abe,” I whispered. “It’s getting bad again. She is.”

He sat up abruptly. “What happened? What did you see?”

I spoke into my pillow. “I don’t know.”