At a glance, I could see the new part had been hastily written—with more urgency, it became apparent. Em had written the new part after the Gallows Lounge shooting. What she wrote was an awakening—the writing-out of a childbirth of the symbolic kind. “Nora was half right when she accused you of trying to start something with me—you may not have been trying to, but you’ve already started something,” Em wrote. Trowbridge had wanted to shoot Em first; he’d taken aim at her first. But when Em was covered with Nora’s blood, standing onstage, as still as a statue, I didn’t know Em had seen me looking at her. I just saw how Em was begging Trowbridge to shoot her—please kill me, too, her eyes, her hands, her whole body had been pleading. I just knew it would have killed me, if he shot Em—this was how I’d been looking at her; that was the look Em had seen.

“I saw how you were looking at me. You can’t look at me like this—you can’t love me that way! How could it ever work?” Em wrote. “I saw you doing those jumping jacks, I heard you calling ‘Fuck you!’ to him—you were trying to get him to shoot you instead of me. Are you crazy? Maybe you should let your mother marry you off to a skier who works in publishing, but you won’t stay married to anybody if you keep looking at me like this. You’re still the boy I danced with at your mom’s wedding. When are you going to grow up? You can’t love me that way,” Em wrote. There was no Love, Em.

While I’d been reading, I could hear Em taking a bath. When I’d finished the new pages, I could tell that she had gone to bed. She was starting out the night in the snowshoer’s bedroom, not with me—that was clear. I certainly understood what was private about the new pages of Em’s letter, but I showed the pages to Elliot Barlow. “Am I crazy, or is Em crazy?” I asked Mr. Barlow, handing her the pages. My good stepfather had always been my first reader; now the little English teacher was my copy editor, too. Here I was, in my late forties, still seeking her advice. According to Em, I still wasn’t a grown-up.

I saw Elliot frown when she was reading the pages; she sighed when she gave them back to me. “This is between you and Em. Of course you’re crazy—you’re both crazy,” the snowshoer said. The little English teacher revealed she had more to say when she began to pace, as if a classroom of students sat in front of her, and behind her was a blackboard where she’d already written something of importance—something she was poised to say. “I didn’t see you, Adam, or your jumping jacks—I was on all fours, you’ll recall; I wasn’t looking in the direction of the stage. But I certainly heard you taunting Trowbridge. ‘You were never in the Marine Corps—you never did anything!’ I heard you tell him. You certainly sounded like you wanted him to shoot you, Adam,” Mr. Barlow said.