I looked in the mirror at my necklace. It was the most beautiful piece of jewelry I had ever owned. Even my wedding ring paled in comparison. But I couldn’t keep it. Just like I couldn’t keep him.

Nicholas called my room three times the next morning. I didn’t answer. I was too afraid. Then he called my cell phone, which I didn’t answer either. Finally he knocked on my door. “Elise,” he asked through the door. “Are you all right?”

I should have answered the phone, I thought. Now he was going to see me, puffy eyes and all.

“Elise, are you all right?”

I opened the door just enough to see him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m okay.”

He looked at me anxiously. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” I said.

He looked baffled. “Nothing?”

“We can talk later,” I said. “After your meetings.”

He looked at me for a moment more, then said, “I meant what I said last night. I do love you.”

My eyes welled up. “I know.”

“I’ll be back soon. We’ll talk. Everything will be all right.”

“Okay,” I said.

He walked off down the hall. I went back to bed, but couldn’t get back to sleep. After an hour I dressed and went out. I wandered around Central Park. I tried to calm myself, to believe his words that everything would be okay, but the fear didn’t leave. It had been with me for so long it didn’t take eviction lightly.

Before you judge me too harshly, consider your own deepest fears—real or imagined. Actually, all fear is born of the imagination, which means that the danger we fear doesn’t need be rational or even real to be potent. Like my fear of snakes.

When I was eighteen I drove my car off the highway into a ditch because there was a snake on the road. It didn’t matter that the snake couldn’t have bitten me through the car. It didn’t matter that the snake probably wasn’t even poisonous or might even have already been dead. It didn’t even matter that swerving off the road at fifty miles per hour posed a much greater danger than the snake I was frightened of. Fear doesn’t listen to reason. It takes its own counsel.

While my saner self recognized that my fear of snakes was partially irrational, my fear of rejection wasn’t. I’d never been bitten by a snake, but I’d been bitten by rejection more times than I could remember. After all the attacks and abandonment I’d endured since Hannah’s death, my heart wasn’t about to believe that someone might be different. Not even someone as beautiful as Nicholas.