Kaveh never mentioned the “incident,” one small blessing. It certainly hadn’t been calculated; it was pure id, like the hand of a demon had reached out of hell and begun puppeting her, half a desire to hurt herself and half a desire to force Ampersand to do something. One second’s thought or self-control would have stopped it, as it was obviously a terrible strategy from every angle, and could only lead to more pain. In one swift stroke of a bottle of Mexican Coke, she’d lost everything. Well, almost everything.

She could sense little, if anything, from the other side of the wall. Ampersand was half-conscious at best, as far as she could tell, the trauma of Pershing Square so overwhelming that it had shut him down completely. She still wondered how much of it was her doing, her disease leaking into him, but if anything, at the moment, the opposite was probably truer.

After all, there was only one way to sever that bond. ’Til death do us part, apparently.

That can’t be. That can’t be all there is to it.

But it is, there is no other way.

It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

And then she started to entertain the thought that maybe it would be more economical for everyone if she just got out of the way sooner.

Is this my thought or yours?

Same as it always is—it’s ours.

Sometimes when Kaveh was out of the house, she stared at the fan that hung from the ceiling of his bedroom and wondered where his brother had hung himself from, who had discovered him. It hadn’t been Kaveh, she knew that much; he had been on the wrong coast at the time. She wondered what it would be like to discover someone like that and resolved she couldn’t do that to him. The same held true of falling from the balcony; too much room for error, too great a likelihood of surviving with permanent injuries, to say nothing of the mess. If she were going to remove herself from the picture, the least she could do would be not to leave him a mess.

Mess was the problem here in Southern California, though, if one wanted a foolproof plan. Pills had too much room for error, as did car accidents. Jumping from a great height was best, but the problem in LA was the only thing there was to jump to was concrete, and the thought of turning into a wet splat was unappealing. If only LA had large suspension bridges over water. Alas, she’d have to drive all the way to the Bay Area for that, all the way to The Bridge.