By now I know better, though a part of me wishes I didn’t. A part of me would like to keep living inside this fantasy, and for a while I cling to it. I write a letter accepting the teaching offer, which I save in my drafts folder. When I can no longer put off responding I delete the draft and write a new letter to decline the position.

The faculty members who offered it to me are stunned. How could I not want to do this? “Are you sure?” they ask, giving me one last chance to reconsider this huge mistake. Who in their right mind would pass this up?

“It would be a ten-year setback,” says Renata. “It would be completely insane.”

A week after I turn down the teaching offer, I rent a car to drive us to a writers’ conference, where Tara meets someone new. He’s a tenure-track poet with the air of a player who’s ready to settle down for the right woman, and immediately I know that woman is her. She and I had planned to share a hotel room, but he stays over instead, and I sleep on the floor outside one of the conference center’s ballrooms. A security guard wakes me up at around five a.m. and tells me to use my purse as a pillow.

When the conference ends we drive home together in silence. A few nights later, we sleep together for the last time. “I’m going to go down on you until you come,” I tell her. I want nothing in return. Besides, she has nothing to give me, not even acknowledgment that any of this is happening. In fairness I can’t give her that either, since I’m technically still attached elsewhere. After she comes I scoot up to face her. She kisses me on the cheek, and as she turns away I catch her mouth with mine, so that together we taste her. She presses her foot against my shin and lets me kiss her for what seems like a very long time. It feels like a goodbye and I treat it as one.

The next morning, I decide to move back to New York once the semester ends. It’s a decision propelled by a barely audible survival instinct, a whisper—Insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.