The delicate hum of the treadmill is like white noise to me. I always need sounds now. Maybe it’s from living in Manhattan for a few years, or from having lived in silence for so many before that. But if it’s too quiet, if things are so still the loudest sound is the ringing in my own ears, I start to feel suffocated. I start to see things and hear things. I start to have daydreams about people coming in the night, breaking into the house and killing all of us. I do the math for how long it will take until our bodies are found. This weekend’s events are an exception, but normally it’s just the family here. It could be weeks before a neighbor knocks on the door. Would the smell of our bodies be the first thing she notices—our rotting flesh wafting into her face the second she comes inside? Or would she notice the cars—hmm, they haven’t moved in a while, that’s strange. Or maybe it would be longer than that. Months. My body would begin to decompose in that bed right next to Graham’s. Maybe we’d die spooning. Or naked. Blowflies and flesh flies and skin beetles crawling over my no-longer-tanned-and-toned body. Entering my mouth, biting at my eyes.

I hit the emergency stop button in the center of the treadmill’s console and nearly fall backwards when the machine abruptly stops. It keeps humming in my ears as I stand there, drenched in so much sweat I’d drizzled all over the thing’s base, and try to catch my breath. Four miles goes fast when you’re thinking about dead bodies. About Ruthie. About Bernadette.

I can feel the paper burning a hole in the pocket of my bra, pressing down on my chest, slowly suffocating me.

On the way back to our bedroom, I stop outside Reed and Veronica’s door. In the darkness, it would be easy for me to hide there, sidle up to the wood paneling until I felt like I was sinking into it, waiting. I think to that day in the apartment when Reed attempted to help me move. I think about him standing beside my suitcases, skeptical.

I think about Graham insisting he pick up Chinese food from the best place on the Upper East Side, leaving me alone in my nightmare. I retreated to the closet—“I have to find my pajamas”—and sat down on the floor. It was the first time I realized there was a rug in there. A rug in the closet. That’s the kind of rich I was moving into. The kind that buys a rug to make sure my feet are comfortable when I’m picking out a shirt.