From a distance, by being forced to explore him in order to render him as a character, she began to understand him, began to sympathize with his decision. For she was wrong to have accused him so, to beat him about the head with her own guilt and insecurity. He didn’t deserve that. Not after all he’d done. But he should’ve written, or called. For the first month, she would cry whenever she thought of him. But the process of shaping her emotions into art had helped to heal her. She still thought of him as a person distinct from the character she’d drawn—a left-wing rasta who lived in Brooklyn—but less and less so as she became involved with molding her story.

This didn’t happen naturally, this mature objectivity. She was feverish and weak for three days after he left. She went to her doctor, worried that she might have caught an infection, and after several tests and referral to a specialist was told that her symptoms were psychosomatic. She was lovesick.

She couldn’t allow this, she told herself, and began to look for reasons to dislike him. She sat up in bed and made a list: He didn’t respect her time—he was always late. He didn’t respect her privacy—he asked a lot of personal questions and had gone through her things while she slept. He was presumptuous—had come to her house and to New York without calling, just assuming it was a good time for her. And there were so many things that didn’t seem to add up or weren’t clear. How did he make his living? And what was he really doing in England? And there was no proof that he’d actually done those drawings in the book he’d sent her. He could’ve easily bought it somewhere.

She threw out anything that reminded her of him. His flowers, the vase in which she’d placed them, the book of drawings, even the plates from which he’d eaten and the glasses from which he’d drunk. Even the towel he’d used to dry his body.

Drawn into a Zenlike calm by the meditative ritual of writing at first light, Sylvia began to find a lot of things more bearable—work, for instance. She had begun to accept it as an imperfect situation in an imperfect world. Writing fiction was her calling. She was clear now. She understood this because she was crafting a novel from truth. Umbra, she could say now, without wavering or rancor, was just a gig to pay her bills.

Her relationship with Lewis had improved as well. They didn’t argue as much, largely, she believed, because she wasn’t as tense about work; also, she admitted, she had become more forgiving since the affair with Fire. What had he done, she would ask herself, that could compare with her infraction? Being arrogant? Condescending? Philistine? And even that thing that Ian had told her about in a rambling letter the other day. What drug was Ian on at the time? That thing about their under-the-table deal. It wasn’t exactly illegal.