Raj closed the window and pressed his hands to his eyes, trying to shut off his thoughts. Lew, Rachel, Clyde, Clay, Annie. And Ruth. He wished he could speak to Ruth again, just one more time. Going over to the antique armoire, he stretched up to retrieve the old journal from behind its ornate pediment. Had Ruth really expected him, a curious young boy, to ignore that pile of journals? He hadn’t been able to resist taking just this one, with a vague sense that he had a right to it, since it contained that hateful passage about him. She must have found out some years later, which was the only reason he could think of for all the other journals vanishing and her period of inexplicable anger. He had been on the verge of giving this one back and asking her forgiveness when Alvin had shot himself; not only had her anger evaporated then but she had overwhelmed him with love.

Through the years, Raj had read that awful passage countless times, until pain had become pleasure—like picking at a scab. The journal opened directly to it. I should keep him in the basement, throw scraps. I should file his teeth into points and make him a monster, charge a dime a head to watch him eat rats. Vile little parasite. Why wasn’t he killed at birth? These words, which had once ripped out, as if from his own heart, the tender roots he had just begun to establish in that world, he read now as comfort. More than comfort; they bolstered him. That such rancor, rage, should now be a kind of love letter was to know that people can change. Rarely, with daunting difficulty, but it was possible. In this way Ruth’s journal had become his article of faith, holding the promise of every holy book: that before we are all changed, we can all change.

And yet it was so complicated. To meet Rachel again, who Ruth had once warned him looked so much like Annie without realizing that in every other way Rachel was just like herself. Rachel, his almost wife, his other life. Was there a man in the world who could refuse when a beautiful woman offered him, without expectation or complication, something of what might have been? He could almost feel the touch of Rachel’s lips. All at once Annie, his wife of over twenty years, who had never quite lost all the weight after Lulu, who had cut her hair boyishly short because she couldn’t be bothered with it, seemed very far away.