“There are no guarantees, and there’s no guarantee of justice in this. There were cultures where they would put hot coals on your tongue if you were on trial, and if you were burned, you were guilty. There’s no more rhyme or reason to how this ends up than there was in that. If you try to imagine there is, then you could end up still holding incredible guilt, with a body that miraculously was fine, or you could end up with a body that was worse than what you have now and losing years of progress in every respect because you attached your expectations to the idea that you end up with what you deserve and then ended up with a tragic result.”

“Or I could get the worst of both worlds, which I feel like I’m doing now. With a body that wants to kill people and all of the self-blame. When I wanted to leave with Weld, I remember you saying I shouldn’t, you didn’t recommend it. You said I had a choice. I made a choice, and people died after that. A lot of people.”

“I think you’re assigning yourself more blame than is right, for those deaths. You played your part, you tried to help, and things were going poorly.”

Sveta shook her head. Emotions surged and seethed through her organs and toward her face, not flushing it or leaving her teary-eyed or leaking bile through her tear ducts only because she controlled herself.

She wanted to say a hundred things, but she couldn’t bring herself to.

“May I?” Jessica asked. She indicated the portfolio.

Sveta nodded.

“Can I sit?”

“I don’t have chairs in here. You can sit on my bag. Here.”

Sveta dragged the bag over by the wall.

“Sit with me?” Jessica asked, as she sat against the wall, sitting on the bag, the portfolio in her lap.

Sveta nodded. She was glad for the company, even though it was hard. Jessica sat so their arms and shoulders touched. Something that hadn’t been possible before.

The portfolio and her development from the oldest images to the newer ones was a depiction of her progress. Things took on more details. More mental resources were freed up as she learned coping skills. Bricks laid atop one another, building something. Progress, step by glacial step.

Jessica started to turn the page, when Sveta stopped her.

Children on the rocks, the paint used with an impasto technique to give rocks dimension and give equal dimension to the waves. That didn’t quite translate to the digital printing of the image, but still…

The images of the children were cruder, not quite matched to the three-dimensional image of the rocks and water, which annoyed Sveta.

“Which one is you?” Jessica asked.