Standing there, Claudia thought: I’ll never have that. She knew that she could only begin to imagine all the ways the last two weeks would knock her around. Every night for the rest of her life she was going to close her eyes and get it from one side or the other: what they did and what she did. One side would press and the other side would press and eventually her brain would break. Who wants to be a family with that girl? That girl shouldn’t procreate. That girl will only sow misery.

In the morning she went to the kitchen and from the window above the sink Claudia could see the long bridge over the Hudson River. According to Google Maps, she could walk there in less than an hour.

Claudia felt like she was watching herself, like in the window on the train. She walked toward the leafy, stone-walled campus; down Main, the drag that held the pizza shop and the wine shop and the coffee shop and the diner and the bookstore and the laundromat; and farther, the barber shop and bodega and cell phone store. She turned toward the river and the part of town the students rarely ventured through. It was early and the sidewalks were mostly empty. She walked past gas stations and boarded-up town houses, municipal buildings and a public park. Hadn’t there been a serial killer who lived nearby? Yes; Claudia remembered that one of Edie’s friends did an art project about the victims for her senior thesis. That word again.

Where the pathway toward the bridge turned into the walkway across it, Claudia encountered a green-and-blue metal sign: LIFE IS WORTH LIVING. And a phone number.

She walked out to the middle and put her face into the wind. Below, the water was mesmerizing; churning, running eventually to the harbor in the city, to the foot of Liberty Island, to the ocean, to Europe. Those first nights alone in the hotel Claudia had made the mistake of Googling. She read about a girl in Canada who gassed herself in the family garage after some boys sent around a video of her. And another in the Midwest who jumped off the top of an abandoned factory. Claudia held onto the railing and closed her eyes, tilting her face to the sun. When she felt the warmth against her cheeks she knew she wouldn’t do it. Chad Drake was not going to take anything else from her. She was hard now, she was careening; maybe she always would be. But she was not going to give up sunny days on the water. She was not going to let him steal that, too.