All I was thinking was that I missed being with another fiction writer, and (at the same time) I didn’t. I’d not seen Sophie for more than a decade. We both loved Thomas Mann, but our mutual admiration for the writer wasn’t enough to keep us together; not even Death in Venice could overcome our disheartening conversation and disturbing sex. To be fair, there was the bleeding—the blood itself wasn’t as bad as Sophie’s need to dramatize the constancy of her uterine bleeding. We were together only a year, when we were in our early twenties. We were just kids. The bloody sheets and towels in the washing machine were disheartening and disturbing, too. Yet it was because of Sophie, and what I missed about being with another fiction writer, that I put the notecard with Wilson’s name and number in my pocket.

Now I know why Nora suspected I was “trying to start something with Em” when I wasn’t. (Nora knew Em was innocent of “trying to start” anything.) But when Em and I started writing each other, there was a newfound intimacy between us; as writers, Em and I were discontented in the same way. Discontent is one thing writers have in common. I was never a threat to the intimacy Nora and Em had as a couple. Nora knew that, too—she wasn’t jealous, not exactly. Yet Nora felt excluded from how alone Em felt, as a writer. When you write fiction, you go it alone. Quite correctly, Nora felt excluded from the aloneness Em and I had in common, too. And when Em and I started writing each other, this also made me miss being with another fiction writer. It wasn’t just meeting Wilson, or that I missed being with Sophie.

It didn’t help that Sophie would show up at my reading and book signing in Boston. Mary Marinelli spotted “something funny” about Sophie’s handwritten question for the Q and A. It was a good question, the kind of question a fellow fiction writer would ask. Sophie had read all my novels. She’d noticed that I’d written two novels in the third-person omniscient voice, and there were a couple of novels with a first-person narrator. Her question was a writer’s question, about narrative point of view. Mary knew I would like Sophie’s question, but “something funny” caught Mary’s eye about Sophie’s handwritten notecard. Mary handed me the card.

Under her name, Sophie had written, “Still bleeding, after all these years.”

“Sophie has nonstop uterine bleeding—she has fibroids. And she’s a fiction writer,” I explained to Mary.

“I see,” Mary said.