The last line was the hardest to read, the one that made my throat burn: “Maybe one day you’ll learn you can’t treat people with such disregard. Even yourself.”

Finally, Anna had mustered the resistance I’d been craving. It was at once frightening and attractive: never had I wanted her more. I felt my body go cold, and for a moment I thought I was going to be sick. “What’s the matter?” Renata asked.

I handed her the phone and watched her deflate while reading the email. “Well, there you go,” she said. “Again.”

For a moment I was pissed. She was my friend, after all, not Anna’s. Then I remembered what she’d been through with Thomas. How he’d lied to her, how she’d found out in the most humiliating way, walking in on him with his high school girlfriend. I knew I had managed to let her down, too.

She handed back my phone. I stared at Anna’s email. I had never felt so exposed—I wanted to take back every vulnerability I’d ever shown her, every moment that I had asked for comfort. “What do I do?” I asked Renata. The question was genuine; I truly had no idea.

“I mean, what can you do? We’re here, she’s there. And she’s seen everything.”

I got up from the table and called Anna. It rang and rang, and still no answer. Fear soaked up every other emotion. I told Renata I needed to change my return flight and leave the next day. I had to get home and deal with this.

“I will seriously kill you if you do that.”

“But what if there’s still a chance to fix things?”

“You do need to fix things,” she said. “But it’s not the relationship that’s broken.”

I looked down at my phone and reread the email. I began typing a response. “Please,” I wrote. I didn’t know what else to say, any attempt to defend myself felt shameful and useless. “I have no idea what I’ve been doing.” I really didn’t: it was as though I’d been sleepwalking, going through the motions without any control.

For the rest of the trip I checked my email compulsively. “I wanna throw your phone in a dune,” Renata said. In the times when we were out of range, we talked. Renata suggested that I’d set myself up to get caught. “Isn’t that essentially what you’ve been asking for, by being so reckless?”