The girl told me to wait in the small atrium. I gulped three glasses of icy water from the cooler and then slumped into one of the sofas that seemed to float on the floor. I closed my eyes. Pictures of Vinca and my father still flickered on my closed eyelids. I had been caught unawares by this nightmare, which further complicated and tarnished my memories of Vinca. I remembered what people had been saying to me all morning: “You never really knew Vinca.” They were way off. I would never claim to truly know anyone. I was a firm believer in Gabriel García Márquez’s maxim that “everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life.” And yet I could not help but notice that, for Vinca, the third of these was uncharted territory.

I was not naive. I was well aware that my image of Vinca had been fashioned by my passionately romantic teenage self. I knew that it was an image that responded to what I’d most longed for at the time: to experience true love with a starry-eyed heroine straight from the pages of Le Grand Meaulnes or Wuthering Heights. I had created an image of Vinca as I wished her to be, not as she actually was. I had projected onto her things that existed only in my imagination. But I could not bring myself to admit that I had been wrong from beginning to end.

“Shit, I forgot my cigarettes. Would you mind getting my handbag from my locker?”

Fanny’s voice roused me from my contemplation. She lobbed a key ring to Debbie, who caught it in midair.

“What’s up, Thomas? We haven’t spoken in years and now, suddenly, you can’t live without me?” she said as she walked toward a vending machine.

It was the first time I’d seen Fanny in her role as a doctor. She wore a doctor’s coat over pale blue cotton scrubs and a surgical cap. Her expression seemed much harder than it had been this morning. Behind her blond bangs, her pale eyes shone with a dark, flickering flame. A warrior of light waging war against illness.

Who was Fanny? Was she an ally or the devil’s right hand? What if Vinca was not the only person from my past whom I had been wrong about?

“I’ve got something to show you, Fanny.”

“I don’t have much time.”

She put coins into the machine and irritably thumped it when it didn’t deliver her bottle of Perrier quickly enough. She gestured for me to follow her out into the staff parking lot. She took off the surgical cap and the white coat, then sat on the hood of what must have been her car: a bloodred Dodge Charger that looked like something off the cover of an old Springsteen album.