“Our life has not been a dream, a romantic fantasy. We were living it hard,” she told him, her voice adenoidally furious. “But you’re throwing it away. I have been living it.”

“You give us both too little credit,” he said, looking at her straight on, seeming entirely guileless, and infuriating.

“I’ve given you far too much,” she answered, the spite corrosive in her throat.

He was packing his things. He was speaking so softly she almost didn’t hear it: “I think this is what you need from me, whether or not you want it.”

“That’s such self-justifying rubbish,” she answered, sneering. And it was. But even then she wondered as she watched him close the flap on his knapsack and tug the straps tight—before she averted her eyes from the bloodspot of truth—

—She averts her eyes from the bloody stains on the butcher’s wrap, the sickening weight she holds in her hands. Even in September she wondered, ever so briefly, before she let her wondering slip, sleek and black, beneath the surface.

31. “Letter in November”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“Letter in November”

DECEMBER 22, 1962

LONDON

In November, a month after Sylvia’s twenty-first birthday, the director of McLean wrote to her mother and Mrs. Prouty, making an assessment of Sylvia’s condition after three unsuccessful months in the hospital. He recommended a course of action that they now considered their last hope. She needed another round of shock treatment, administered correctly a final time by the psychiatrist she had come to trust.

And it wasn’t like the other ones—the shrieking, homemade missile of sizzling light that exploded at the center of the crowd in her mind, spitting Coke-bottle shrapnel, knocking everyone down, blackening the faces. Leaving everything killed but undead; leaving her desperate to die. No, the last shock treatment was more like a witless blink in time, a black holiday to oblivion from which she woke on a regular day, breathing. But it worked like a miracle. It was almost the concept of shock, the punishment, that she needed, and it soothed her. Enough, her doctor told her, to begin her recovery.

How does one know when something’s done, when the cycle is complete—