“Dr. Beuscher says I’m trying to accomplish two mutually canceling things this year. One is that I want to write. The other is that I want to free myself of Mother. But now I can’t write because I’m afraid she’ll take possession of everything I do, as she always has.” She slides the smooth soles of her wool-socked feet down the bed sheet to reach past her knees for the copy of “Mourning and Melancholia” atop the quilt. “It’s all in here,” she says. “Almost word for word my experience when I was twenty, eerily exact. In Freud’s terms, Mother is a vampire draining my ego.”

“Then don’t let her,” Ted says. “While we’re still here, simply do what you can to practice craft. Develop your daily discipline. But don’t worry about producing anything, for yourself or for your mother. Just write. You have a wealth of words; they’re there. They’re your bank account. You needn’t squander them frivolously or inauthentically.”

“Like Cordelia,” she says.

“Like Cordelia,” Ted answers. He rolls toward her, putting his arm around her, running his hand over the quilt, the weight of his arm at her waist. He stops, lifting the edge of the quilt in his fingers—a kind of masculine daintiness—and slips his hand under it, under the soft weave of her thin cashmere pullover, brushing her skin. “So, shall we find your costume?” he asks, kissing the side of her neck, the ticklish spot under her ear. Fingers trace her rib cage.

“I don’t want any costumes,” she whispers, his hand cupping her breast, turning toward him on her hip. “‘She’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,’” she whispers as she helps him with the zipper on her skirt.

The weakening sun sinks beneath the crest of Beacon Hill, drowning somewhere beyond the icy river on this last day of the year. Bits of ash caught in the last glint of light sweep up the window glass and spiral, clean and white, like snowflakes.

She is getting better. It’s the shock of it all that is so painful: mourning, after all these years, the love, simply of herself—naked, not what she could make or be, merely warm and human, flawed, like the scar at her temple that he kisses now, lowering himself to her, entering her—the love that she had never, deep in her heart, felt to be truly hers.