If I was supposed to use this time away to clear my head and decide what I wanted, it just wasn’t working. What if you never actually decided? What if you kept going along and going along doing the next thing and the next, then one day you looked around and here was your life, already nailed down, already as good as over.

I drove back, parked, and walked uphill to find Viridian and Sacha on the front porch of their cabin. As we sat, Ken Spinner and his two girls hiked past us, towels in hand. Ken waved. “We’re going to check out the hot tub!”

When they’d gone, Sacha said, “How do guys like that keep getting away with it? How does he keep getting invited places when he only does it to get laid? I don’t care how many books he sells.”

Viridian sighed. “They all used to be like that. The men. Of course, almost all the writers were men. The ones taken seriously. One of the perks of the job was groupies. Please tell me that things have changed.”

Sacha said she wasn’t sure she could. “Although there are more women writers out there now. Smart, tough women. More awareness. More useless sexual harassment training, at least if you have an academic job.”

Same amount of pigs, I thought, and maybe the others felt the same, because we let the dismal topic drop.

Sacha cleared her throat. “We need to talk about your medicine.”

“No, we don’t.”

“I think you forgot to take your pills.”

“Then I think she must have been counting them,” Viridian said to me. “I think she should be made to admit it.” She wasn’t going to make things easy.

“We’re allowed to worry about you.”

Viridian said she had not forgotten her medication; she had chosen not to take it. It made her feel unwell and slow-witted. She could not afford to be less than her best when she was working. She would make a doctor’s appointment as soon as she got back home. She felt better today than she had yesterday. She’d felt better yesterday than she had the day before. Everything was moving in the right direction.

Sacha said, “How about if you take your pill in the evening instead of morning. That way if it makes you feel funky, you’ll sleep through it. Wake up and be tip-top.”

Viridian seemed exasperated, but also aware she wasn’t going to win this fight. “All right. If it would make everybody happy.”

“If it would keep you from having an adverse health event, then yes, it would make everybody happy.”

“I’m an old lady, and I fully expect that there’s an adverse health event with my name on it out there.”

Sacha turned to me. “You see what we’re up against.”