She was reading the manual to Bernard’s VCR. It was a European booklet in four languages. She had finally settled on the German version, the English being incomprehensible. She scanned the pages, page after page. Then finally—finally, finally—she rose up, weary, from the tall stool.

She grasped the videocassette that lay at the bottom of the slanted table, grasped it with exhausted, trembling fingers. This in itself had been no easy acquisition. Visits to three separate Prime Time rental locations. A long trek home to find some acceptable form of identification. A long search and the long trek back again. By day’s end, the world was too much with her, but she had a copy of Spectre in her hands.

She carried it up the stairs. Mounting slowly, leaning hard on her dragon walking stick. She moved hunched through the shadows of the landing to Bernard’s door. Entered his room, turned on the light.

The little space was as Bernard had left it, thoroughly out of order. The narrow bed was unmade. Jeans, shirts, underwear were strewn over the stained carpet. Dishes with crumbs, glasses half full of gin, were stained brown with crushed stubs, or overflowing with ashes. The white shelves stacked high above the bed were stuffed with piles of books and magazines, the corners of torn pages sticking out of them. The piles of books and magazines on the bedside table rose up across from the shelves, the bed between. One book, called The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, lay on the sheets near the grubby pillow. One journal, called Raising Cane, lay spread just beneath it. A pretty nun winked at Harper from the cover, caressing a ferule. Sisters of Mercilessness.

Harper frowned and shook her head. How long, she wondered, could the boy hold on? No, that wasn’t what she wondered, not really, not all in all. She wondered, rather, whether she had given him the wherewithal to hold on long enough. Iago would be sure to find his weaknesses, but had she taught Bernard honestly enough to keep him from being taken by surprise? Had enough of the truth been understood between them, or had she only hoped it was, assumed it was to save herself the pain of speaking it?

She moved with shuffling steps to the television at the foot of the bed. Sometimes, she thought, it seemed the Catholics had it right: it seemed there was nothing that could not be forgiven except the failure to confess. The gods appeared to her just then to despise secrecy above all things. More than cruelty, more than theft, more than dishonor, they punished you for what you left unspoken—worse, they punished the ones you loved, the ones to whom you should have told all.