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

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

I felt him behind me, his knees fitted into the back hollows of my own, his arms around my stomach, his voice hot in my ear: “You have to tell me what you saw.”

But I kept silent. I’m talking about then. Maybe there was a time. Maybe there had been hundreds of times, of bruises. I braced myself for sleep. I knew those bruises. I knew they wouldn’t let our dreams alone.

I woke to find him already dressed. His suit looked perfectly crisp. We had to leave, he said. He couldn’t believe we’d come at all. She needed us, he said. I was still waking up. She needed more than us, I said. She needed real help.

“Well,” he said. “She doesn’t need us skipping town to fuck.”

He’d always been a made-love man. And now here we were: fuckers.

“How bad was it?” he asked. “Whatever you saw. Just tell me.”

I wasn’t protecting him anymore, only myself—what would he say, could he say, if he knew what I’d fled?

*   *   *

The drive felt longer than the sum of its hours. The tar wind gusted through our open windows and lifted my hair into tumble-weeds around my ears. We were returning, like criminals, to the place we called home.

“I thought you got it,” he said. “Better than I did.”

“Got what?”

“How bad she was, how far she’d gone.”

“I was …I don’t know, Abe. I was trying.”

“You were so sorry, right? For everything your mother did, your whole family. You wanted to be some kind of hero. But you didn’t, really, or else you would have stayed.”

Here he was, a harder Abe than I’d seen, showing me my own life as I’d been living it—picking up a woman like a paper doll, tattered in the middle of a desert. I’d found this new city where I could tell myself stories about my mother and how I wasn’t becoming her: Stella the tenderhearted, the patient, the redeemer. I believed them until I crumpled them into paper balls and wrote new ones: Stella the lover, the make-lover, the earnest listener and spooned-up sleeper. But they were just that, only stories, turned ridiculous by the full sight of Tilly’s ruined body.

Maybe we couldn’t keep this up, I told him. Maybe we were done. He said maybe I was right.

I felt the opened seam of myself, gleaming. With love, I kept learning the same thing: I could hurt so much without anyone having done wrong. I wanted his ache like a stone polished from handling, to hold in my palm. But he wouldn’t bleed. He turned away his aquarium eyes and left me to the terrible privacy of his silence.

*   *   *