“I don’t plan on coming in versions.”

“Jesus, you are young.” Then his voice shifted back to its radio frequency, a fancy chocolate in its little matching rustling crenellated wrapper. “How mean was he?”

“He was nice, right up until the moment he wasn’t.”

“Well,” he said, “so. You’re making progress. Wish him well.”

“I wish him well but not that well.”

But that wasn’t true. I wanted them both dead.

“The only way forward is to wish peace for those who have wronged you. Otherwise it eats you up.”

I wished him peace when I thought he was doomed.

How can it be that I felt like this, over so little? It was as though I’d rubbed two sticks together and they’d detonated in my lap.

“I bet you have a nice bathtub,” I said.

“You should go look.”

I got myself a dollhouse bottle of bourbon. At some point he’d had ice delivered, in a silver bucket, with tongs. I had never used ice tongs before. I have never used them since. The serrations bit into the ice, one, two, five cubes, and I poured the bourbon over, a paltry amount that didn’t make its way to the bottom of the glass, it just clung to the ice, so I got another. The bathroom was marble—marble, crystal, velvet, it would be some years before hotels stopped modeling opulence on Versailles. There was a phone on the wall by the toilet. I ran myself a bath and got in. This was what I needed, not advice or contradiction, not the return of the person who broke my heart, because I would not be able to trust any love that might have been offered. It took me a long time, years, to trust anyone’s.

The door opened, and another miniature bottle of whiskey came spinning across the floor.

“Irish is what’s left,” said the radio shrink through the crack of the door.

“You’re a good man,” I said. “You are one. If you’re worried that you’re not.”

Then he came in. He was wearing his cowboy boots and slid a little on the marble. Now he looked entirely undone. In another version of this story I’d be made modest by a little cocktail dress of bubbles, but no person who really loves baths loves bubble baths, nobody over seven, because bubbles are a form of protection. They keep you below the surface. They hide you from your own view. He looked at me in his bathtub with that same disappointed look: just like you to bathe in your birthday suit.

“I have some advice for you,” I said to him.

“Lay it on me,” he said.

“Lay it on me. How old are you?”

He shook his head. “What’s your advice?”

“You should call your callers Caller. Like, Are you there, Caller?”

“They like to be called by name.”

“Overly familiar,” I said.